46. Exegesis on the Path Illuminated by Mabel Collins

[Part I]

What the mind, which is directed towards the finite (kama manas), calls truth is only a subspecies of what the esotericist seeks as “the truth”. For the truth of the mind refers to that which has become, which is manifest. And the revealed is only a part of existence. Every thing in our environment is at the same time product, creature (i.e. what has become, what is revealed) and germ (what is unrevealed, what is becoming). And only when we look at a thing as the two aspects (what has become and what is becoming), then we see that it is a link in the One Life, the life that has time not outside itself but within itself. Thus finite truth is also only a becoming; it must be enlivened by an evolving truth. The former is grasped; the latter is “noted”. All mere scientific truth belongs to the first kind. For those who seek such truth alone, “Light on the Path” is not written. It is written for those who seek the truth that is a germ today in order to become a product tomorrow; and who do not grasp what has become, but pay attention to what is becoming. If anyone wants to understand the teachings of “Light on the Path,” then he must generate them as his own and yet love them as completely different, just as a mother generates her child as her own and loves it as different.

The first four teachings, when understood, open the gateway to esotericism. — What does a person bring to the objects of his knowledge? Whoever examines himself will find that joy and pain are his response to impressions from the sensual and supersensible world. It is so easy to believe that one has discarded pleasure and pain. But one must descend into the most hidden corners of one's soul and bring up one's pleasure and pain; for only when all such pleasure and all such pain is consumed by the bliss of the higher self, only then is knowledge possible. One thinks that one will become a cold and sober person as a result. This is not the case. A piece of gold remains the same piece of gold - in weight and color - even when it is transformed into a piece of jewelry. Similarly, Kama remains what it is - in content and intensity - even when it is spiritually transformed. The power of Kama should not be eradicated, but incorporated into the content of the divine fire. Thus the eye's subtlety shall not discharge itself in tears, but gild the received impressions. Dissolve every tear and give the radiance it has to the ray that penetrates the eye. Wasted power is your joy and your pain; wasted for knowledge. For the strength that flows into this joy and this pain shall flow into the object of knowledge. “Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.” He who still abhors the criminal in the ordinary sense, and he who still worships the saint in this ordinary sense, has not weaned his eye from tears. Burn all your tears in the will to help. Weep not over the poor; recognize his situation and help! Murren not over the evil; understand it and change it into good. Your tears only cloud the pure clarity of the light. You feel all the more tender the less sensitive you are. The sound becomes clear to the ear if this clarity is not disturbed by the rapture and sympathy that meet it at the entrance to the ear. “Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.” To put it another way, let the heartbeats of the other resonate within you and do not disturb them with the beating of your own heart. You should open your ear and not your nerve endings. For your nerve endings will tell you whether a sound is pleasant or not; but your open ear will tell you what the sound itself is like. When you go to the sick person, let every fiber of his body speak to you and absorb the impression he makes on you.

And to summarize the first two sentences: Reverse your will, let it become as powerful as possible, but do not let it flow into things as yours, but inquire into the nature of things and then give them your will; let yourself and your will flow out of things. Let the radiance of your eyes flow out of every flower, out of every star; but hold back yourself and your tears. Give your words to the things that are mute, so that they may speak through you. For they are not an invitation to your lust, these mute things, but they are an invitation to your activity. Not what they have become without you is there for you, but what they are to become must be there through you.

And as long as you impose your desire on a single thing, without that desire of yours being born of the thing itself, you wound the thing. But as long as you wound anything, no master can listen to you. For the master hears only those who need him. But no one needs a master who wants to impose himself on things. Man's lower self is like a sharp needle that wants to dig in everywhere. As long as it wants to do that, no master will want to hear its voice. “Before the voice can speak to the masters, it must unlearn the wounding.” As long as the sharp needles of the “/ch will” still stick out of the words of man, his words are the messengers of his lower self. Once these needles have been removed and the voice has become soft and pliable, wrapping itself around the secrets of all things like a veil, it weaves itself into a spiritual garment (Majavirupa), and the master's delicate sound clothes itself in it. With every thought that a person devotes to the inner truth of things in the true sense of the word, he weaves a thread to the garment in which the master may clothe himself when he appears. He who makes himself a messenger of the world, an organ through which the depths of the world's riddles speak, pours his soul's life into the world, his heart's blood moistens his feet so that they carry him swiftly to where work is to be done. And when the soul is where the lower self is not, when it is not where man stands enjoying himself, but where his active feet have carried him, then the Master also appears there. “And before them the soul can stand, the blood of the heart must moisten the feet.” He who remains within himself cannot find the Master; he who wants to find Him must let the strength of his soul - the blood of his heart - flow into his deeds - into his active feet.

Such is the first meaning of the four fundamental teachings. Those who live by this first teaching can have the second revealed to them, and then the following ones. For these teachings are occult truths, and every occult truth has at least sevenfold meaning.

[Part II: The following explanations refer to sentences 17 and 18 from Chapter 2 of “Light on the Path”]

§ 17.2. Chapter.

[Ask the innermost, the One, about its ultimate secrets, which it has held for millennia. The great, difficult battle, the conquest of your own soul's desires, is a labor of millennia. Therefore, do not expect the prize of victory until you have gained experience over millennia. When the time comes that this last teaching becomes truth, man enters the threshold that lifts him above humanity.

These last few paragraphs of the second chapter of “Light on the Path” contain wisdom of the deepest kind. In No. 17, there is the invitation to ask the “innermost”, the “One” about his “secrets of the last”. Whoever shines a light into the depths of this “innermost being” will indeed find the results of “millennia”. For what man is today, he has become through long millennia. The “innermost being” has passed through worlds, and hidden in its bosom are the fruits it has taken from these worlds. That our innermost being is as it is now, we owe to the fact that countless formations have worked on its structure, that it has passed through many realms and that it has formed organs out of these realms over and over again. Through these organs, it has entered into an exchange with the worlds that have surrounded it in each case. And what it has gained from this interaction, it has taken over into new worlds, in order to have ever richer experiences on new levels, equipped with the achievements of the past. And today we use the differentiated essence of our innermost being to have a sum of experiences on the “planet” we call “Earth”. All the experiences of the “moon planet” and the earlier ones are in our innermost being. They were already in this innermost being when, through a pralaya, it developed into “earth”. And so these experiences were in the Pitri nature of this innermost being, just as the whole lily is - latently - in the lily seed. Of course, the lily seed is still something physically visible. But the Pitrisame, which slept its way from the moon to the earth, was incarnated in the highest kind of matter, perceptible only to the eye opened to the Dangma. But just as the lily seed, when it is placed in suitable soil, organizes the elements of earth, water and air in such a way that a new lily is formed, so the “Pitrisame”, in its cycles through earthly existence, the “Pitrisame” arranges the matters in such a way that in the course of these cycles the full “human being” gradually emerges, who, after the 6th and at the beginning of the 7th earthly round, may truly be called “God's image”. Until the middle of the fourth round - until the end of the Lemurian period - the human Pitrinatur divides itself in the work on its own organism with “formers” of the highest and higher kind; but from this point on, more and more of the human “innermost” must take over this work itself. K. H. says the following about this work: All you have to do is become a complete human being. For know that in your physical nature alone you are now already almost a human being. For you will only be a complete human being in your physical nature at the end of the fourth round. Your astral body, your mental body and your ego body (higher manas) are still unorganized and chaotic. Just as your physical body is complete after the fourth, so must your astral body be after the fifth, your mental body after the sixth, and your arupic (higher mental) body after the seventh, if you are to reach your destiny at the end of the earthly cycles. And only when you have reached this destiny can you, as a normal terrestrial Pitri, pass over to the next planet.

Those, however, who want to walk the occult path should work more and more consciously on this threefold externalization of their higher bodies from their “innermost being”. That is the meaning of meditation. One shapes (organizes) one's astral body by elevating it to the higher self and by self-examination. Just as extra-human forces have worked in past rounds to build the organs of today's physical body, so the inner human higher self works on the astral body so that it may become an “image of divinity” or also “fully human”. Then it becomes suitable to experience the secrets of higher worlds through its organs in the same way as the physical body experiences the secrets of the physical-mineral world through its sense organs. We examine ourselves in the evening with regard to our experiences during the day; we rise to our “higher self” through the well-known formula. In both activities we have an organizing, building effect on our astral body. Only through this do we make it into an astral organism, into a body with organs, whereas before it was only a kind of carrier. This “formula” is this: “Brighter than the sun, purer than the snow, more subtle than the ether is the Self, the Spirit, in the midst of my heart. I am this Self. This Self is me.” However, this opens up the view to a ‘work of millennia’, as it says further in $ 17. Just as millennia were necessary before the outer physical likeness was achieved, so a work of millennia will be necessary before this likeness is achieved for the higher bodies. Only then will man stand at the ‘threshold that lifts him beyond humanity’. And he must come to this threshold in the 7th round in the same way as he had to be at the threshold at the end of the lunarian (moon) epoch, which raised him above the lunarian pitritum.

Through the mental meditation of a sentence from the inspired scriptures, the meditator organizes his mental body. When a person takes such meditation sentences from the Bhagavad Gita or from other scriptures that the theosophical literature provides, then he is working on the organization of his mental body. It must be emphasized again and again that in this meditation it is much less important to intellectually go through the sentence - this should be done separately outside of the actual meditation - than to live with the sentence with a completely free field of vision of consciousness. It should tell us what it has to tell us. We should be the ones to receive from it. If it is an inspired sentence, then it begins to live in our consciousness, then something alive flows out from it, then it becomes abundance in us, previously unsuspected content. As long as we speculate about it, we can only put into it what is already in us. But that does not help us to progress.

The organization of the ego body depends on the devotional part of our meditation. The more we achieve through this devotion, the deeper and more earnest it is, the more we will resemble the being that we are to emerge from our planetary life to the tasks that will be set for us in a later being.

§ 18.

[The knowledge you now call your own is only yours because your soul has merged into one with all souls and become one with the innermost. A treasure from the Highest is entrusted to you. But if you betray its trust, abuse your knowledge, let it slumber when you should use it, then even from the heights you have reached, a fall is still possible. Even at the threshold, exalted ones still recoil, unable to bear the responsibility and unable to soar higher. Therefore, always remember this moment with holy fear, with anxious trembling, and prepare yourself in advance for the fight.

We must experience that we are one with all that lives. We must be clear about the fact that what we call our own has no life if it wants to be an idiosyncrasy. It has just as little life as our little finger would have life if it were cut off from our whole organism. And what for our little finger would be the physical-sensory cutting off, that would be for our peculiarity a knowledge that only wanted to refer to this peculiarity itself. We were one when we entered the planet, which was the third before our Earth, within an all-divine essence; we were within the all-divine essence and yet a peculiarity, just as each note in a symphony is a peculiarity and yet one with the whole symphony. And what we dare call our individuality shall have an effect on whatever it encounters in the 343 worlds through which it passes (seven planets, seven rounds on each planet, seven so-called globes for each round = 7 x 7 x 7 metamorphoses = 343). What we are able to experience there is laid in us at the beginning as an inclination. And that is the treasure, “familiar to you from on high.” And just as the treasure is familiar to us, so we should place it in the harmony of the planetary symphony. An experience will present itself again and again to him who fully understands these things. All deepening within us remains barren and empty if we want it only for ourselves. To strive for our own perfection is only to indulge a higher form of selfishness. Our knowledge must always flow out from us. This is not to say that we should always teach. Each person should teach as they can, and when they can. But the smallest action in everyday life makes it possible to be a living result of selflessly acquired knowledge. And when we have the feeling that all life is one, that all separateness is only based on Maya: then all our deepening into our inner being is also acquired with the living feeling that it should come to life in the All-One Life. But then our deepening is always rewarded with fertility. Then we are sure that we cannot fall. Those who strive for knowledge only to know, only for the sake of their own perfection, only to advance on the ladder of existence, can still fall even if they have already risen very high. And above all, we must be aware of the “responsibility” that we take upon ourselves by acquiring higher knowledge. Only a certain measure of development is allotted to humanity as a whole in the path of development. If we perfect ourselves, if we acquire a measure of perfection earlier than would be possible in normal progression, then we take something from the common measure of humanity for ourselves. We make the scale tip in our favor; the balance leaps up on the other side. Only by giving in some way can we make up for what we have taken. But we must not think that it is better not to take. That would mean being selfish again and avoiding taking so that we would also be relieved of the duty of giving. Not taking and not giving means death; but we are meant to serve life. We must acquire the ability to give; therefore we must take on the responsibility of taking. But we must be aware of this responsibility at every moment. We must constantly reflect on how we can best give when we have taken. This gives rise to a “struggle”, a serious, sacred struggle. But this struggle must be. We must not shy away from it. We must always prepare ourselves for this struggle. In particular, the great significance of this struggle was and is demonstrated to the adepts of all schools of initiation. They are admonished to fulfill themselves, to imbue themselves with the consciousness of this struggle. When our innermost being breathes the life of this struggle as the fundamental mood of the soul, then the inner sight and the inner hearing awaken in this innermost being. And when we are able to be calm, completely calm, on this battlefield, then higher secrets begin to flash across our astral and mental heaven. Then feelings and thoughts are symbolized in us as spiritually tangible realities; and out of the mist of these spiritually tangible realities, the voice of the Master sounds and the form of the Master takes shape. We begin to enter into higher communication. We no longer remain mere actors in the world, but become messengers (angelos) for it.

What is described here as an exegesis of No. 18 is, sentence by sentence, reality, higher reality to be experienced. And whoever imbues themselves with the meaning of this sentence (No. 18) in this way becomes a citizen of higher worlds. (To be continued in the very near future).