LIFE-NATURE

Giving up by the vital of its cherished desires, emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal and impersonal knowledge, power, delight of which the life must become an instrument and an epiphany, but of which it has at present no inkling and no sense of its greater joy and strength for fulfilment.

It has been said as long ago as the Upanishads (hard is the path to tread, sharp like a razor’s edge); it was said later by Christ ‘hard is the way and narrow the gate by which one enters into the kingdom of heaven’ and also ‘many are called, few chosen’ — because of these difficulties. But it has also always been known that those who are sincere and faithful in heart and remain so and those who rely on the Divine will arrive in spite of all difficulties, stumbles or falls.

The cry of the psychic is always, ‘‘Let the Truth prevail, let Thy will be done and not mine’’. But the clamour of the vital is the very opposite: it calls to the Divine, ‘‘Let my will be Thine; obey my insistences, satisfy my desires, then only will I seek and accept Thee, for then only will I consent to see the Divine in Thee’’. It is hardly necessary to say which is the way to the Truth or which the right solution of any struggle in the nature.

The lower nature is ignorant and undivine, not in itself hostile but shut to the Light and Truth. The hostile forces are anti-divine, not merely undivine; they make use of the lower nature, pervert it, fill it with distorted movements and by that means influence man and even try to enter and possess or at least entirely control him.

Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit's sight:
In the enormous emptiness of thy mind
Thou shalt see the Eternal's body in the world.