Chapter
1 Discrimination
To Those Who Knock
From the unreal lead me to the Real.
From darkness lead me to Light.
From death lead me to Immortality
The first of these Qualifications is
Discrimination; and this is usually taken as the
discrimination between the real and the unreal which leads
men to enter the Path.
It is this, but it is also much more; and it is to be
practiced, not only at the beginning of the Path, but at
every step of it every day until the end. You enter the
Path because you have learnt that on it alone can be found
those things which are worth gaining.
Men who do not know, work to gain wealth and power, but
these are at most for one life only, and therefore unreal.
There are greater things than these—things which are real
and lasting; when you have once seen these, you desire
those others no more.In all the world there are only two
kinds of people—those who know, and those who do not know;
and this knowledge is the thing which matters. What
religion a man holds, to what race he belongs–these things
are not important; the really important thing is this
knowledge–the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has
a plan, and that plan is evolution. When once a man has
seen that and really knows it, he cannot help working for
it and making himself one with it, because it is so
glorious, so beautiful. So, because he knows, he is on
God’s side, standing for good and resisting evil, working
for evolution and not for selfishness.
If he is on God’s side he is one of us,
and it does not matter in the least whether he calls
himself a Hindu or a Buddhist, a Christian or a
Muhammadan, whether he is an Indian or an Englishman, a
Chinaman or a Russian. Those who are on His side know why
they are here and what they should do, and they are trying
to do it; all the others do not yet know what they should
do, and so they often act foolishly, and try to invent
ways for themselves which they think will be pleasant for
themselves, not understanding that all are one, and that
therefore only what the One wills can ever be really
pleasant for any one. They are following the unreal
instead of the real. Until they learn to distinguish
between these two, they have not ranged themselves on
God’s side, and so this discrimination is the first step.
But even when the choice is made, you
must still remember that of the real and the unreal there
are many varieties; and discrimination must still be made
between the right and the wrong, the important and the
unimportant, the useful and useless, the true and the
false, the selfish and the unselfish.
Between the right and wrong it should
not be difficult to choose, for those who wish to follow
the Master have already decided to take the right at all
costs. But the body and the man are two, and the man’s
will is not always what the body wishes. When your body
wishes something, stop and think whether you really wish
it. For you are God, and you will only what God wills; but
you must dig deep down into yourself to find the God
within you, and listen to His voice, which is your voice.
Do not mistake your bodies for yourself—neither the
physical body, nor the astral, nor the mental. Each one of
them will pretend to be the Self, in order to gain what it
wants. But you must know them all, and know yourself as
their master.
When there is work that must be done,
the physical body wants to rest, to go out walking, to eat
and drink; and the man who does not know says to himself;
“I want to do these things, and I must do them.” But the
man who knows says: “This that wants is not I, and it must
wait awhile.” Often when there is an opportunity to help
some one, the body feels: “How much trouble it will be for
me; let some one else do it.” But the man replies to his
body: “You shall not hinder me in doing good work.”
The body is your animal–the horse upon
which you ride. Therefore you must treat it well, and take
good care of it; you must not overwork it, you must feed
it properly on pure food and drink only, and keep it
strictly clean always, even from the minutest speck of
dirt. For without a perfectly clean and healthy body you
cannot do the arduous work preparation, you cannot bear
its ceaseless strain. But it must always be you who
controls that body, not it that controls you.
The astral body has its desires—dozens
of them; it wants you to be angry, to say sharp words, to
feel jealous, to be greedy for money, to envy other people
their possessions, to yield yourself to depression. All
these things it wants, and many more, not because it
wishes to harm you, but because it likes violent
vibrations, and likes to change them constantly. But you
want none of these things, and therefore you must
discriminate between your wants and your body’s.
Your mental body wishes
to think itself proudly separate, to think much of
itself and little of others. Even when you have turned
it away from worldly things, it stills tries to
calculate for self, to make you think of your own
progress, instead of thinking of the Master’s work and
of helping others. When you meditate, it will try to
make you think of the many different things which it
wants instead of the one thing which you want. You are
not this mind, but it is yours to use; so here again
discrimination is necessary. You must watch unceasingly,
or you will fail.
Between right and wrong, Occultism
knows no compromise. At whatever apparent cost, that which
is right you must do, that which is wrong you must not do,
no matter what the ignorant may think or say. You must
study deeply the hidden laws of Nature, and when you know
them arrange your life according to them, using always
reason and common-sense.
You must discriminate between the
important and the unimportant. Firm as a rock where right
and wrong are concerned, yield always to others in things
which do not matter. For you must be always gentle and
kindly, reasonable and accommodating, leaving to others
the same full liberty which you need for yourself.
Try to see what is worth doing; and
remember that you must not judge by the size of the thing.
A small thing which is directly useful in the Master’s
work is far better worth doing than a large thing which
the world would call good. You must distinguish not only
the useful from the useless, but the more useful from the
less useful. To feed the poor is a good and noble and
useful work, yet to feed their souls is nobler and more
useful than to feed their bodies. Any rich man can feed
the body, but only those who know can feed the soul. If
you know, it is your duty to help others to know.
However wise you may be already, on
this Path you have much to learn; so much that here also
there must be discrimination, and you must think carefully
what is worth learning. All knowledge is useful, and one
day you will have all knowledge; but while you have only
part, take care that it is the most useful part. God is
Wisdom as well as Love; and the more wisdom you have the
more you can manifest of Him. Study then, but study first
that which will most help you to help others. Work
patiently at your studies, not that men may think you
wise, not even that you may have the happiness of being
wise, but because only the wise man can be wisely helpful.
However much you wish to help, if you are ignorant you may
do more harm than good.
You must distinguish between truth and
falsehood; you must learn to be true all through; in
thought and word and deed. In thought first; and that is
not easy, for there are in the world many untrue thoughts,
many foolish superstitions, and no one who is enslaved by
them can make progress. Therefore you must not hold a
thought just because many other people hold it, nor
because it has been believed for centuries, nor because it
is written in some book which men think sacred; you must
think of the matter for yourself, and judge for yourself
whether it is reasonable. Remember that though a thousand
men agree upon a subject, if they know nothing about that
subject their opinion is of no value. He who would walk
upon the Path must learn to think for himself, for
superstition is one of the greatest evils in the world,
one of the fetters from which you must utterly free
yourself.
Your thought about others must be true;
you must not think of them what you do not know. Do not
suppose that they are always thinking of you. If a man
does something which you think will harm you, or says
something which you think applies to you, do not think at
once: ” He meant to injure me.” Most probably he never
thought of you at all, for each soul has its own troubles
and its thought turn chiefly around itself. If a man speak
angrily to you, do not think: ” He hates me, he wishes to
wound me.” Probably some one or something else has made
him angry, and because he happens to meet you he turns his
anger upon you. He is acting foolishly, for all anger is
foolish, but you must not therefore think untruly of him.
When you become a pupil of the Master,
you may always try the truth of your thought by laying it
beside His. For the pupil is one with his Master, and he
needs only to put back his thought into the Master’s
thought to see at once whether it agrees. If it does not,
it is wrong and he changes it instantly, for the Master’s
thought is perfect, because He knows all. Those who are
not yet accepted by Him cannot do quite this; but they may
greatly help themselves by stopping often to think: “What
would the Master think about this? What would the Master
say or do under these circumstances?” For you must never
do or say or think what you cannot imagine the Master as
doing or saying or thinking.
You must be true in speech too—accurate
and without exaggeration. Never attribute motives to
another; only his Master knows his thoughts, and he may be
acting from reasons which have never entered your mind. If
you hear a story against any one, do not repeat it; it may
not be true, and even if it is, it is kinder to say
nothing. Think well before speaking, lest you should fall
into inaccuracy.
Be true in action; never pretend to be
other than you are, for all pretence is a hindrance to the
pure light of truth, which should shine through you as
sunlight shines through clear glass.
You must discriminate between the
selfish and the unselfish. For selfishness has many forms,
and when you think you have finally killed it in one of
them, it arises in another as strongly as ever. But by
degrees you will become so full of thought for the helping
of others that there will be no room, no time, for any
thought about yourself.
You must discriminate
in yet another way. Learn to distinguish the God in
everyone and everything, no matter how evil he or it may
appear on the surface. You can help your brother through
that which you have in common with him, and that is the
Divine Life; learn how to arouse that in him, learn how to
appeal to that in him; so shall you save your brother from
wrong.
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