Knowledge of Life One
6. IDENTIFICATION AND LIBERATION
6. IDENTIFICATION AND LIBERATION
1Consciousness is always linked to matter. In lower kingdoms it is, moreover, a slave to matter. The process of development can in that respect be described as a process of liberation that goes on until consciousness itself is unaware of the existence of matter. The human kingdom marks the stage at which consciousness as self-consciousness is made aware of its dependence and the self ceases to be the slave of matter in order to become its lord.
2In all molecules there are positive and negative atoms with positive and negative energy, positive and negative consciousness. This has been called the “dualism of manifestation” (not to be confused with other kinds of dualism). From the technical point of view, the process of identification and liberation implies that what was positive in liberation (largely automatically and unconsciously) becomes negative in relation to the next higher, being now positive. The energies that made the acquisition of higher consciousness possible are not experienced any more as the highest energies but as effects of still higher energies. Consciousness development is such a process, and its tempo becomes dependent on the capacity and purposiveness of the individual. Gradually the individual becomes receptive to the energies of higher worlds and learns to use them rightly.
3It is true that consciousness is linked to matter, but it is energy that makes the content of consciousness conceivable to self-consciousness.
4The individual (the self, the monad) apprehends everything through his envelopes and identifies himself with the consciousness in the various molecular kinds of his envelopes in order to get to learn that kind of reality. He acquires higher envelopes by gradually learning to distinguish between lower and higher, unessential and essential. The mistake we all make is our inability to liberate ourselves from that kind of reality which we consider essential, which we have come to love and cannot bear to lose.
5Evolution implies a continuous process of liberation: physically from interests, relations to individuals or groups, restricting conditions; emotionally from binding devotion to persons, causes or missions; mentally from schools of thought, political, social, religious idiologies.
6The self gradually acquires the ever richer consciousness content, reality content, of ever higher consciousness layers by identifying itself with these new kinds of reality. At the same time the self liberates itself from dependence on the content of its lower kinds of consciousness. It is one of the paradoxes of life that a condition of liberation from the lower is identification with the higher, and a condition of identification is liberation. It is largely a process in the subconscious which becomes manifest only at the transition from the lower to the higher, a transition that as a rule is critical.
7The consciousness development of the self can thus be regarded as a continuous process of identification and liberation, the identification of self-consciousness with ever higher kinds of envelope consciousness and simultaneous liberation from lower kinds.
8We can understand whatever we identify ourselves with. What we understand (not comprehend) is what we have been in the past. In identifying ourselves with it, it is easy for us to overestimate the importance (“value, “life value”) of the new. Its relative importance we realize only when, in the future, we have liberated ourselves from our dependence on it. The process thus brings about a continual “revaluation of values”, of everything which we have once regarded as essential or necessary.
9Liberation entails freedom from the dependence on illusions and fictions of lower kinds, the dependence on mankind’s innumerable misconceptions of reality, on ever more of the superstitions that dominate mankind, on ever more idiologies of life ignorance. Through our experience in life upon life we learn to distinguish between the freaks of life ignorance and the facts of reality. We cannot enter into the world of ideas as long as we cling to human constructions of any kind. The causal view on life is something totally different from anything that men are able to conceive of, an entirely new view on reality which we cannot experience until we have seen the irremediable pseudo-reality of the human views.
10Liberation is of course facilitated in so far as the individual (the self, the monad) realizes that he is not his envelope consciousnesses and can say to himself: “my envelope consciousnesses desire this, but I desire it not”.
11As long as liberation from the lower is perceived as “sacrifice”, this evidences that the individual has not had sufficient experiences in the lower, for in the opposite case liberation is sensed as an indispensable need, so that you are grateful for being able to renounce the lower.
12When, at the end of his journey through the human kingdom, the individual looks on human life and has come to learn its difficulties and limitations in consciousness, then the allurements of this life have lost their attraction. He gladly says good-bye to it all.
13Liberation from the physical shows itself in the joy at physical desirelesness and independence of physical circumstances. But that does not in the least mean that the man despises the one world that has provided him with the possibility of consciousness development.
14Liberation from identification with the world of emotions shows itself in the fact that the pertaining illusions have lost their allurement. Then the individual has learnt to see that emotional desires grow in strength by being satisfied, cannot ever be contented, blind the power of judgement, counteract evolution, and command an unreasonable price. That insight deprives them of the enormous power of illusion. The individual realizes that this power is important at lower stages where it entices the ignorant of life to have the necessary experiences and thereby develop the powers of attraction and imagination, which are powers of emotional consciousness.
15Liberation from identification with mental consciousness (the liberation that is the most difficult for the intelligentsia) shows itself in the understanding that it is impossible without material for comparison to distinguish between fictions (mental ideas) and reality ideas (Platonic ideas, which we receive from the planetary hierarchy), that fictions deceive us and that idiologies falsify reality.
16Man does not know himself, for he identifies himself with some one of his envelopes which he takes to be his own self. Most people do not even know that they possess more envelopes than their organism, because they experience only their subjective consciousness, which they believe to be a faculty of the organic envelope.
17Since the self (the monad) is not conscious in its causal envelope but regains its consciousness in its envelopes of incarnation only, and since these are new in each incarnation, the self cannot identify itself, which fact has given rise to the dogma and error of Christian theology that the self has no pre-existence and is created along with the organism. Only when the self has acquired objective causal consciousness can it in its causal envelope study all its previous incarnations and ascertain its continuous self-identity. This self-identity is everything that remains of the experiences in the human kingdom when the self, having been an individual self in the four lowest natural kingdoms, becomes an ever more comprehensive collective self (an ever larger self with ever more other selves) in higher kingdoms. This perhaps makes you understand why the self must give up its egoism, its egotism, to be able to enter into the essential kingdom. An egotist self cannot become a collective self and unite with other selves.
18Anyone who wants to reach higher must realize that he is something “lower”, that the personality is selfish, that everything binding the personality is a hindrance to our entering into the community of all. This presupposes the realization that true happiness is the happiness of all, and its condition is the unity of all.
19Consciousness development is a continuous process extensively and intensively, the acquisition of self-consciousness in the ever higher kinds of matter in a world and in ever higher worlds. As long as the acquisition of higher consciousness is just subjective, this cannot be ascertained, since it requires also objective consciousness and thus self-consciousness in this new kind of matter. This is said in reference to the first self (the monad in the first triad). For the second self (the monad in the second triad), the difference between subjective and objective consciousness disappears. The pertaining kind of consciousness is simultaneously both subjective and objective consciousness and self-consciousness. The matter aspect disappears, as it were, to the consciousness aspect, which instead is directed towards the acquisition of the energy aspect, where matter is energy, manifests itself as magic, of course in connection with the continuous expansion of consciousness.
20The monad (the self) identifies itself with its envelopes and their consciousness. The entire evolution consists in the successive identification by self-consciousness with the ever higher kinds of consciousness (in the different molecular kinds and in the different envelopes of the monad). This identification is done automatically in the four lowest natural kingdoms.
21When the individual identifies himself with the physical, then he is little more than an intelligent but dangerous beast of prey.
22When he identifies himself with his emotions and then usually (like 85 per cent of mankind) with his lower emotionality, then he is the victim of illusions that hamper his own development.
23When he identifies himself with mentality, then he is (without esoteric knowledge) the victim of the fictions of life ignorance.
24When he can identify himself with causal consciousness, then he is able to ascertain for himself whatever facts he wants to in the worlds of man (47–49).
25In the human kingdom the self at the stage of barbarism identifies itself with the physical consciousness of the organism; at the stage of civilization and culture, with the consciousness of the emotional envelope; at the stage of humanity, with the consciousness of the mental envelope; and at the stage of ideality, with the consciousness of the causal envelope. Only causal consciousness enables the self to experience the past as existing in the present. There is no past to the causal consciousness of the causal self, since this consciousness can identify itself with the total consciousness of the causal world, which in itself retains the memory of everything that has occurred in the three worlds of the planet (47–49) ever since the planet came into being.
26The further evolution of the self in the fifth and sixth natural kingdoms consists in the identification by the monad or self, in its first or lowest triad, with the consciousnesses in the second triad and subsequently in the third triad.
27When the self passes from the first triad mental molecule to the second triad mental atom, the old causal envelope, which has been the envelope for the triad during the entire sojourn in the human kingdom, is dissolved and the self can thereupon and instantaneously form its own causal envelope.
28When the self is able to identify itself with the consciousness of the second triad essential atom, then an essential envelope is formed and the self becomes an essential self. The self’s further consciousness development goes on in the analogous manner.
1Consciousness development, the acquisition of consciousness in the kinds of matter of all the higher worlds, all the higher kingdoms, presupposes the renunciation of all lower kinds of consciousness with their consciousness content, their knowledge of the lower worlds which the individual takes to be “the whole reality”, which is his basic error.
2With each higher kind of consciousness (energy, reality) the self acquires, the self is liberated from its dependence on lower kinds: in turn from its dependence on being attached to things physical, emotional, mental, causal, etc. The lower has once and for all lost its allurement, its power to fascinate, to lead astray. This is the essence of freedom, the gaining of power over whatever has held sway until then, the liberation from life ignorance and impotence with the gaining of higher power as a consequence of ever greater ability to understand and apply the Law.
3The individual is truly free (liberated) when he can no longer be dominated, be attached, by anything in the human worlds (anything physical, emotional, mental). As long as these forms can enchant and attach and hinder us to strive for the infinitely richer life of the fifth natural kingdom, so long we have still much to learn, we condemn ourselves to further incarnations. He is free who is free from the dependence on anything in the human kingdom. What we should be able to learn from life at the mental stage is that human wisdom is “vanity”, that it affords us no knowledge of reality and life, that the kingdom of man is but a kingdom of preparation.
4It is important to realize that you do not give up the lower until you have mastered it completely and you know that it has fulfilled its purpose, has nothing more to teach you. You reach nothing higher by “sacrificing the lower for the higher” before all conditions are fulfilled. That is a thing you can never decide by yourself, a fact which apparently most people cannot possibly realize and so demonstrate their immaturity.
5It is not by sacrifice and renunciation that the individual is able to identify himself with higher kinds of consciousness. Renunciation is a direct consequence of the shift of values. The lower has lost its allurement, its attraction, its significance for anyone who has got other interests.
6For an emotionalist the physical has lost its allurement; for a mentalist, both the physical and the emotional; for a causalist, everything the first self looked upon as indispensable. Of course the value of everything is recognized, but for the causal self it has a value only as a possibility to serve mankind thereby. The lower becomes a means instead of an end.
7Liberation is a natural process. You cannot liberate yourself by severing any ties. In another life these severed ties will bind you even tighter. You cannot free yourself from the attachment to riches by giving away what you have got, but only by faithfully administering that which perhaps feels like a burden. You do not reach the higher as long as there is anything left of selfish desire to reach the higher. The process is an automatic one that goes on without our interfering and deciding. It is rather that you do not know how and when the “shackles” fell off. One day we discover that life has solved the problem for us, without our doing anything about it. It just turned out so. Once again it appears that anyone who forgets himself in service will have no problems with himself. Every thought of the personal self becomes an obstacle to liberation.
8Sacrifice and renunciation is nothing good in itself. You may sacrifice and renounce in many different, perverse ways. Thus it is abortive to save and scrape in order to will your money away to charities. In so doing you have lost the opportunity of cultivating the qualities that go along with the personal sympathy for the needy you meet everywhere. You have thoughtlessly passed so many needy people by. Leaving “charity” to other people is to lose sight of the essential.
9The great risk of all esoteric knowledge is that the immature so easily misunderstand everything. It is not enough to know the facts. You must also know how to apply the knowledge, and that you cannot do until you have mastered it so that it all makes up a living whole. There are also risks involved in occupying yourself with things that belong to future states. That was the good thing about the knowledge orders. Their members did not receive any knowledge of what belonged to higher degrees. Then there were no such prohibitions in their subconscious which poison people’s life. Now readers think they are supposed to practise things for which they will be ripe in a hundred incarnations hence. Until then they should practise “the wonderful freedom of the children of god”. You must be “free” in order to develop.
10There is no such “categorical imperative” as Kant thought of. For the esoterician there is just a definitive choice based on knowledge of the Law. But that choice is free from all compulsion. It is the free choice of insight between various alternatives. Where there is compulsion there is no freedom, whether in respect to outer or inner conditions. Man’s will is determined by his strongest motive. When the individual has “come of age” spiritually, then his strongest motive will also be the result of his own work.
11Often liberation is conceived as “you may not”. That is totally wrong. You may but do not want to. You may but are glad you do not need to. You may but are unable to. You may but are past, are beyond this. It is one of the paradoxes of esoterics that you can love only then when you think you will never more be able to love. There are no commandments, prohibitions, etc. in esoterics. Whatever appears as such is the description of mental states.
12A very common mistake which idealists make is that they want to “achieve” too soon, reach too soon the goal which it may take many incarnations of work and toil to reach. Many people read of liberation and are in their idealist enthusiasm ready at once to renounce and refrain from everything, refrain even from such things as are still necessary for them for their further development, such things as life has brought to them as tasks to solve, duties that life has laid on them or they have taken on themselves, such things as they think are hindering them in their striving. After such mistakes they will be set to learn their lessons again, and such lessons will be increasingly difficult to master. Shortcuts prove to be the longest ways round. They should consider the fact that only the wise can wisely apply the knowledge. That, too, is one of the many esoteric paradoxes. A meaningless sacrifice is a futile sacrifice. They should learn to see that, when they have learnt the lesson, life will rid them of any unnecessary burden. Conditions are then arranged automatically without their having anything to do with it. The right attitude is to want to, be prepared to make “the sacrifice” and welcome liberating circumstances but not throw away what life has given them and not sever any ties. The will to renounce, the power to renounce, is a good thing, but to renounce too soon is always a mistake.
1The more intensely the self identifies with the consciousness content of its envelopes, the more thoroughly it learns from its experiences.
2In each new incarnation the individual has to begin from the beginning and learn to activate the consciousness in his envelopes. As a rule, the individual (who has attained the humanist stage) passes through the experiences of the barbarian stage during his first seven years, those of the civilizational stage, between seven and twenty-one years; those of the cultural stage, between twenty-one and thirty-five years. It is important that he during the first seven years is given the requisite guidance and is taught rules for action, what is necessary for living with other people without friction. When the individual has clearly discerned the limits set by the equal right of all and has willingly adapted himself to them, only then is he ripe for self-education. After seven years of age, the individual begins to identify himself with his feelings at the lower emotional stage, the repulsive ones. During the following fourteen years he gets to know most of the pertaining feelings, such as fear, anger, contempt, envy, vindictiveness, malicious pleasure, and the presumption of self-assertion with all its varieties. At the same time the inference and principle thinking of mental consciousness develop more and more.
3Since most people have never reached any of the higher developmental stages and do very little for their development in a new incarnation (the purpose of amusements: “to kill time”), they remain on the levels they have attained. Those who have reached the humanist stage (47:5), however, cultivate instinctively and automatically (subconsciously) the attractive (“altruistic”) feelings, simultaneously widening their principle thinking into perspective consciousness. At this stage reason becomes the dominant factor, emotionality comes under the rule of mentality, and Platon’s tenet, “he who knows what is right, does what is right”, an axiom the validity of which has always been contested by theologians, will almost have the character of law.
4It is not enough to have reached a higher level. The important thing is to stay there. The old tendencies remain and assert themselves spontaneously. Daily attention is required. If your “meditation” is made sufficiently intense, then it can be very short.
5Even the individual at the humanist stage can walk about like a fool among fools, see, hear, and understand nothing, until one day he perceives “the synthesis” and realizes what was the meaning of all his previous experiences. Automatically they fall into their right contexts and lend reality content to the seemingly least meaningful things. The esoterician must learn “to walk in darkness”, to understand nothing. That is a lesson that makes him see things. The comical in this is that all the others are the more sure and certain of everything. He alone is the “fool”.
1The process of consciousness, the process of expansion, can be compared to a process of liberation from all limitations. Thence the talk in occultism of the “spirits in prison”. Where there are bounds of any kind, where the force field (range of action) is circumscribed, where the range of contact is limited, there is the prison of consciousness, it sees its limitation and drives the instinct of life to conquer.
2All monads in lower kingdoms are prisoners in these worlds, since their consciousness is so limited, restricted at best to some few per cent of the entire cosmic total consciousness. To serve evolution is to widen the limits of consciousness as far as possible so that the monads are able to enter into the next higher kingdom, into ever higher kingdoms.
3Mankind has unwittingly started the process of liberation for the monads in lower kingdoms (by mineral treatment, plant and animal breeding), worked on them with their thought (influenced the triads with mental energy). One day that service of liberation will be purposeful.
4Thus service in the esoteric sense is, first and foremost, to help people to liberate themselves from their confinement in respect of consciousness, their attachment to views once acquired whenever these views prove to be obstacles to further consciousness development. But to help them only then. You can do a great deal of harm by preaching ideals of liberation that are too far above both understanding and ability. That is the usual mistake made by all apostles of freedom. They preach ideals of freedom which in people at lower stages of development can just lead to expressions of lawless self-will, arbitrariness, and ruthlessness. Freedom without law leads to disaster for the individual and for all mankind to its annihilation. The failure to realize this was the great mistake of so called ideal anarchism, which in its fatal ignorance of life was unaware of the fact that in man at his present stage of development the percentage of selfish qualities outweighs by far the percentage of unselfish ones. Man is both good and bad, has good as well as bad qualities, and the bad ones are much more easily stirred into activity in a mankind that is still in the regions of repulsive emotions. Only he can be granted freedom who identifies himself with the law, freedom in so far as he realizes the necessity of law.
5The planetary hierarchy considered for a long time which method it should use: to let mankind wander the path of slow evolution so that the majority in the course of millions of years (at least ten million) would succeed in attaining causal consciousness, or the path of efficient education. At the instance of those who had passed from the fourth to the fifth natural kingdom in the most recent centuries, it was decided to choose the method of education. And so mankind was to experience two world wars and a menacing third. If men will not listen to reason, then they must learn it on the path of aggravated suffering. They have been given everything necessary to understand reality and life. They have been given knowledge of the meaning of life, how we are to reach the fifth kingdom in nature. If they go on preferring irrationality and inhumanity to common sense and goodwill, then they will be cured of their craze for possessions and their preferring the amusements and diversions of physical life to mental development.
6The esoterician must regard the decision of the planetary hierarchy to take more energetic measures to be the only rational one. Men grow more and more physically oriented instead of pursuing the opposite path, that of common sense. They prefer the matter aspect to the consciousness aspect, prefer machines to understanding of life. It is high time that cul-de-sac were barred. Otherwise it is better to drown mankind a third time. The number of diseases swells the more they are able to remedy. Soon the physical world will be one big hospital. Such a life is not worth living.
1The esoterician learns not to cling to anything when time is up for liberation. As a rule this coincides with the fact that “matters arrange themselves” without his doing. Man can seldom or never decide himself when he has learnt enough from what he calls his own. The yoga philosophers, who call everything illusion, perhaps find it easier to “renounce” but overlook the fact that everything is reality and that we are here in order to learn to master this kind of reality. This might be called the “Western standpoint” in contradistinction to the Indian. From the logical point of view this is the only tenable view and so in all worlds and kingdoms.
2The individual liberates himself from his dependence on the needs of the animal body, from the needs of the emotional envelope, and finally from the needs of the mental envelope or consciousness. When he has achieved this he is a causal self. The process is repeated in higher envelopes of higher kingdoms. First the individual must satisfy the needs of the envelopes with all the experiences of life which that implies. When he has learnt everything he needs to learn in order to dispense with his envelope, this will be an obstacle if he does not liberate himself from his dependence on it. An esoteric educator must learn to see when the disciple is ripe for the various liberations and must not help him to achieve liberation too early and, in any case, never force the process.
3The esoteric teacher must not force the disciple’s liberation from his emotions as long as the disciple needs them in order to feel alive, before the disciple has acquired the requisite qualities of attraction and eliminated all the repulsive ones. The teacher must not teach the disciple to liberate himself from all intellectual needs before the disciple has developed his mental powers. It is a great mistake to hold the lower in contempt before it has been mastered and made superfluous. When the longing for liberation is there, the time is up, not before. And this longing must not be fostered from without. It takes many incarnations before the individual has learnt everything there is to learn on the various levels of development.
4It is true that the esoterician strives to liberate himself from his dependence on his emotional and mental states of consciousness. But he cannot do that by merely refusing to attend to them. If they cause difficulties and conflicts, then they make up problems the individual must solve himself, for only in so doing has he liberated himself for ever and can help others in similar conditions.
5Asceticism in the usual sense is regarded by the esoterician as meaningless. As a rule it breeds unwarranted smugness. The esoterician abstains from one thing after another in order to convince himself that “this” has no power over him, but that he abstains if he wants to and whenever he wants to. He is no “slave to vice”. He is his own master and decides himself when he wants to satisfy his physical needs. He treats his organism well, however, for the better it is, the fitter tool is it.
6He meets with more difficulty when he wants to learn to master his emotional envelope with its tendencies acquired during millions of years and with which he has so long identified himself as his true self. It takes several incarnations before he is able to master his emotional life, and this is done by the aid of his mental consciousness. He learns to dominate his organism relatively easily by his emotional will. But in order to master the emotional tendencies it is required that he has developed the mental will and learnt to make the rational motive the determining factor. He realizes that he must counteract his emotional complexes by developing new and opposite complexes, replace his instinctive “bad” qualities with “good” qualities. This he does by never attending to the old qualities (starving them out by denying them attention) and constantly meditating on the qualities he wants to acquire.
7In order to become a causal self the individual must constantly try to imagine how a causal self would judge things and events and how he would act. By constantly directing his attention to higher consciousness and living “as if” he already possessed it, he activates it in a process that goes on until the self is actually able to live in it (has acquired self-consciousness in it). A good aid in this is that the individual constantly tells himself, “I am not my envelopes, I am not these kinds of consciousness, I am not my sense perceptions, I am not my feelings, I am not my thoughts”, etc. But of course he must then know his own stage of development and not imagine himself to be something that is unattainable at this stage. That is the fault with most occultists. They imagine they are much further advanced than they really are. To have acquired esoteric knowledge is not enough and does not mean that you have reached a higher level all of a sudden. Esoterics liberates you from the superstitions, but that does not mean that you are one of those higher beings of whose existence you have been informed. The esoterician can safely assume that he is at the emotional stage as long as he can be swayed by his emotions in any way.
8As regards identification with the higher and liberation from the lower, the disciple is warned not to occupy himself unnecessarily with the problems belonging to liberation. Attention reinforces everything it observes and the lower envelopes are stimulated, which makes liberation more difficult.
1We incarnate in order to have experiences and to learn from them. That is realized only by those who understand the meaning of life and recognize that everything the individual meets with has its particular meaning. How this is arranged can be understood only by those who have knowledge of the great cosmic organization and its tools in the worlds of the solar system. The cosmos itself has come into being in order that the monads shall become gods and, in their turn, help others to become gods.
2The path to liberation is to value everything higher as the most valuable. We will be free only when we do not pay tribute to the physical, emotional, and mental any longer. This is done step by step: liberation from the physical through the emotional, and from the emotional through the mental, ever higher interests until we live in the world of ideas. We learn to look on everything from the viewpoint of essentiality, from the planetary viewpoint, etc., until we have reached cosmic perspectives. This may be pure inventions for lack of facts, but the tendency to enlarge the horizon effects liberation from many limitations.
3The path of development means a process of winning freedom through hard work, freedom from everything that is apt to keep us back on lower levels, on any level in succession. This means liberation from everything that charms, fascinates, everything that appears ideal, indispensable, irreplaceable, divine to us on level after level, and no level can be omitted that we have not already gone through. Every level seems to the newcomer as the highest in life, until he has had the necessary experiences. In its entirety development is liberation from dependence on the matter aspect in the fourth natural kingdom and from dependence on the consciousness aspect in the fifth natural kingdom. In the sixth natural kingdom, the individual gains full understanding of the motion aspect, will aspect, energy aspect, and this means what man with his very limited resources of perception would call omniscience and omnipotence within the solar system.
4The more thoroughly you are able to liberate yourself from the lower, the more easily you assimilate the higher. This liberation goes on without force and is the expression of an irresistible need that will not have, cannot think of anything else. This inner need is a sign that you have established a contact with your Augoeides, in doing which you experience yourself as the ideal you are in the causal world.
5There are many kinds of liberation: liberation from the physical envelopes at the transition to the emotional world; liberation from prejudice, illusions, and fictions picked up since childhood; liberation from environment and acquaintances; liberation from old interests. In liberation lies also that you get time to direct attention to things that are essential to consciousness development.
6”Revelation” is a continuous process in which the individual by his own work (instinctively and automatically in accordance with the laws of life) makes continually new discoveries. The process can be described as a continual unveiling of reality, a removal of the limitations of the lower.
7Many lives of work and toil lie before the disciple, but the continuous revelation, the continually increased insight into and understanding of reality is full compensation for everything the disciple must endure while he is liberating himself from ever more limitations.
8Liberation from the power of emotional attraction through mental sovereignty can be brought about in two different ways. The one way is the attempt to kill out all the feelings of attraction so that the individual becomes cold and hard. The other way is the mental cultivation of the feelings of sympathy with full understanding and simultaneous knowledge of the necessity of independence. For most people this will be possible only after many painful experiences. As a rule this presupposes that the self has acquired higher causal consciousness (47:2) and is able to see things from the causal standpoint.
9The teaching of Buddha is still not understood. What he sought to make clear was that the development of judgement possible for man at his present stage of development is the result of the energy of emotional attraction applied in a manner that liberates man from his dependence on energies of lower kinds. As long as the individual is dominated by these lower energies, his judgement is blinded. He must be free from this dependence in order to be able to use the energies in the right way. There is an apparent paradox in the fact that the powers of attraction bind the individual to the thing that attracts him, which they must not do if he shall be able to use them in the one right way. You cannot reach higher levels until you have liberated yourself from whatever binds you to lower things. Higher energies are acquired through domination of the lower ones.
10Identification with a wider area of consciousness of course implies consciousness development, but can become a new prison if it counteracts further striving after expansion. That is a thing which the fanatic can never see.
11A good aid in the formation of your character is to make yourself an ideal picture of the individual you wish to be. By daily contemplating this picture you are influenced more and more to imitate it.
12Sportsmanship teaches the individual training to win his game to refrain voluntarily from many things that others think they need. This is an appropriate way to teach the individual to liberate himself from his dependence on many unnecessary habits. Therefore, sports and athletics are movements to be encouraged. The corresponding is true of emotional and mental interests. That is an important viewpoint when considering what should be supported and encouraged in the education of social groups at various stages of development.
The above text constitutes the essay Identification and Liberation by Henry T. Laurency. The essay is part of the book Knowledge of Life One by Henry T. Laurency. Copyright © 1999 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.