SNAKES AND SCORPIONS

A wrong force. Scorpions and usually snakes are symbols of harmful energies; the vital nature of earth is full of these energies and that is why the purification of man's outer vital nature also is so difficult and there are so many wrong movements and happenings in him, because his vital is easily open to all these earthly movements. In order to get rid of them, the inner being must wake and grow and its nature replace the outer nature.

The thing is to learn to detach oneself from any such experience and learn to look at such perversion of others from a higher altitude from where one can regard these manifestations in the proper perspective, the impersonal one. Then our difficulties really and literally become opportunities. For knowledge, when it goes to the root of our troubles, has in itself a marvellous healing-power as it were. As soon as you touch the quick of the trouble, as soon as you, diving down and down, get at what really ails you, the pain disappears as though by a miracle. Unflinching courage to reach true Knowledge is therefore of the very essence of yoga. No lasting superstructure can be erected except on a solid basis of true Knowledge. The feet must be sure of their ground before the head can hope to kiss the skies.