We as teachers cannot make you into that
which we should wish for you, and were you to work to please the higher order
alone, you would not become lastingly in that which you have given over to.
This is the covenant of the ego. It is as mysterious and profound as you might
expect it to be! How stupendously configured we are! How protected we be, that we may immortalise qualities which we now
choose - yet it has to be of our own
choosing - deliberate, exact, and of our own.
Many
teachings appear to contradict this understandably. It is usually given to be honorable that we should put ourselves last before all others and that we can
trust in those who are higher and wiser to know for us, to guide us, and to
hopefully, in part, do for us. This is why men will go to professionals for
many things, not the least of which we may ask a priest for a blessing and a
weatherman for his chart, having more confidence in their expertise and
knowledge than our own.
As
esotericists we know that there are many good deeds we may become involved in
that are also self-serving. As hard as it sounds, we are aware that if we teach
well it enhances our own learning, if we nourish we ourselves shall thrive
because of it, if we give charity (and charitably into the bargain) we do also
have our returns. Therefore, we know, that karmicly, ethically, virtuely and
accordingly, we profit by ‘doing good’. However,
we do not ‘do good’ for self-serving reasons primarily, we do not even manage
them for self-preservation. We engage in them because of the sense of both
correctness and joy which follows when our invisible helpers are encouraged by
our acts of faith and goodwill.
There once was a man who ran a small drug
dispensary. It was rather a private and small business with low overheads. He
had no actual rent to pay for as he worked out from either his home, or as was
preferred, he would go out to the people person-to-person and deliver what was
required.
His scales were electronic and very
portable. He had an assortment of plastic bags and a calculator, a little
change purse, a discreet satchel to place it all in, alongside the substance
which was already divided into neat and accurate packages.
Although
the turnover was considerable, and his mark-up and profits brought in ten times
the average wage, this travelling apothecary of a man had difficulty in saving
much, if not all, for his monies went to pay the cost of his gambling.
When
he was found to have died from a premature death (through violent means) the
authorities had many choices as to who may have been the murderer :
a) his supplier
b) one of his customers
c) his wife
d) his brother (to whom he owed money)
e ) his broker (of the street variety -
money lender)
f) his mistress
g) one of his gambling debtors
or
h) a ‘hit-man’ employed by one of the above
As it turned out he had actually killed
himself.
Shortly after the funeral he was called
into that part of death which incorporates the wastelands of earthly living.
Here he did experience the many insanities which he himself had promulgated
whilst he was alive. Every nerve-ending which had been excommunicated from some
other's body in obeisance to the asphyxiating chemical dust which drew their
life, their passion, their comprehension and their selfhood right out from
them; every misplaced pain, every angel’s tear, every struggling mother, gagged
word and strangled thought; every corrupted virtue - poked at him with the
needle of the after-death message.
There is no sleep in this condition.
There is no reprieve, no rest, no pause between the first message and the last.
Our apothecary had to make account for that which he had had part in being
cause to; and it was terrible.
Much
later, when regret was imprinted upon his sorry, sorry, self he came to that
place where one collects all of the investments they have begun in their
lifetime comprising their great hopes, huge enthusiasms and life-filled
enterprises. These are those things which require an honest self and a true
heart, yet originate also in the kernel of who we most readily and ordinarily
are.
There
he found very little awaiting him. He discovered that he had by and large
forgotten himself in such false charities as he had been most given to. All of
the folk on the authority’s check-list (with the exception of the possible
hit-man) had demanded of this man his time, his thought, his obedience, even
his congeniality. He had put them all before any real sense of true wanting. He
had assumed that second best (meaning: second to his own true self ) was the
way that one lived life. It had not occurred to him to leave the pattern which
was feeding itself and not his soul. And yet sadly, not one recipient amongst
them had truly cared for him: for his identity, for his desires, for his life
and what it could have stood for.
He
may have appeared as an icon of selfishness, when viewed from the perspective
of his trade, but in truth he was a weak man who had tried very hard (in all of
the wrong ways) to do what was required of him. He suffered for being wrong.
And he was wrong because he had not the ability to confer with his true self.
Had he been able to refer to that protective inner wisdom which knows both
consequence and worthwhile desire, he would have corrected many decisions which
later impelled him to keep being answerable for.
Fundamentally,
the argument is that an individual would not instinctively go against himself
and cause himself harm as first preference. Therefore, if we but knew our true
hearts we would not be capable of sin or a disabling misplaced self-sacrifice
such as our chemist found himself given to. If we tumble out of grace into this
democracy of wills then we are but conceived in another one’s dreams, yet shall
not and cannot be made by them.
When we say the words “me, myself and I”
to ourselves we experience a containment, a familiarity and a censor from the
outer world. We begin at the beginning,
as it were, with that innate sense of privacy which we dwell in, of that
Sanctus, cordoned, rarefied soul-space .... singular to being, yet arterially
defined in Father God.
Our
sense of such being, in conscious wakefulness and urging, needs be that first
reference from which all actions thereafter flow. And although this appears to
be a given and most obvious to the fact, it is not largely occurring in ‘modern
Man’ today.
In
contradiction to all that has been obtained in fledgling egohood there has been
a loss of continuity that the soul awareness once gave us. In past
consciousness there was not the capacity for such selfhood as distinguished and
contrasted in the singular, for the comprehension of a man saw his being
implied most everywhere, and the outer world with all of its history implied
and living within him as well.
However, there was this accompanying continuity
known by him which gave him his selfhood also. Because he found his self to be
in totem and meaning, in living and binding relationships most everywhere, his
‘I’ and his being were relevantly and apparently real to him. This World was his being, and the outer Cosmos his
parent soul.
Now
by comparison, the gift of the modern ego equips us with the powers to
distinguish the detailed differences which exist within this one Creation. We
are also, most importantly, going through a process of discrimination whereby
we are actively deciding what there is in the world, that we should prefer to be dominant
within our own selfhood, and have choice also as to
that which we would willingly cast away. We are no longer given to everything. Just as a man who has moved
from an entire house into a little room, with the narrowing of our
consciousness we are sorting out and making space for those things which we
hold most important to us and not bringing over the rest.
In
order to begin to qualify our lives in this manner, and to do so productively
as far as our future selves are concerned, each individual has to answer for
themselves, from themselves.
The
point of saying that we need to refer firstly in conference with our own being
is essential insofar as we are not living to merely decorate our inner chambers
with but a nonsense to the soul within. That which goes to form our lives needs
be connected to the reality of both heart and reason that it be maintained in a
living fashion to our inner life. If we are to refer to others (to social law,
to popular opinion, to demands set upon us from other individuals who would
have us do as they do) before that of our own decree, then we have no living
connection to that of our own future.
Without a desire that comes right out from
our own being for that which we take to ourselves, there is no living spiritual
thread that can be maintained and worked upon.
Equally it can be said: What we do
and live and become within the outer world, directly persists within us inwardly
and marks out our future lives to come. If
we are not respecters of our own sense of being and give over our lives to the
choosings of others our ‘congeniality gone-too-far’ will betray us. For example:
