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SALVATION FROM OUR THOUGHT-FORMS

SALVATION FROM OUR THOUGHT-FORMS

I speak now for aspirants, who, through concentration and meditation, are gaining power in thought. I speak for the thinkers of the world, who, through their one-pointed application and devotion to business, to science, to religion or to the varying modes of human activity have oriented the mind (not the emotions but the mentality) to some line of constant action which is necessarily a part of the divine activity in the large sense.

It is right here, in the use of thought, that the difference between black and white magic can be seen. Selfishness, ruthlessness, hatred, and cruelty characterise the worker in mental substance whose motives are, for many lives, centred around his own aggrandisement, focussed on his personal acquisition of possessions, and directed entirely to the attainment of his own pleasure and satisfaction, no matter what the cost to others. Such men are happily few, but the way to such a point of view is easy to achieve, and many need to guard themselves lest they tread unthinkingly the way towards materiality.

A gradual and steady growth in group consciousness and responsibility, a submergence of the wishes of the [482] personal self and the manifestation of a loving spirit characterise those who are oriented towards the life side of the divine whole. It might be said that human beings fall into three main groups:

1. The vast majority, who are neither good nor bad, but simply unthinking and entirely submerged in the evolutionary tide, and in the work of developing a true self consciousness, and the needed equipment.

2. A small, a very small number, who are definitely and consciously working on the side of materiality or (if you prefer so to express it) on the side of evil. Potent are they on the physical plane, but their power is temporal and not eternal. The law of the universe, which is the law of love, is eternally against them, and out of the seeming evil good will come.

3. A goodly number who are the pioneers into the kingdom of the soul, who are the exponents of the new age ideas, and the custodians of that aspect of the Ageless Wisdom which is next to be revealed to mankind. This group is constituted of the unselfish and intelligent men and women in every field of human endeavour, of the aspirants and disciples, of the initiates who sound the note for the various groups and types, and of the Occult Hierarchy itself. The influence of this band of mystics and knowers is exceedingly great and the opportunity to work in cooperation with it at this time is easier of attainment than at any other time in racial history.

The first group is unthinking; the two other groups are beginning to think and to employ the laws of thought. It is with the use of thought by the aspirant that I seek to deal. Much about thought will be found in A Treatise [483] on Cosmic Fire, but I intend to give some practical ideas and suggestions which will help the average aspirant to work as he should.

Let us remember first of all that no aspirant, no matter how sincere and devoted, is free from faults. Were he free, he would be an adept. All aspirants are still selfish, still prone to temper and to irritability, still subject to depression and even at times to hatred. Oft that temper and hatred may be aroused by what we call just causes. Injustice on the part of others, cruelty to human beings and to animals, and the hatreds and viciousness of their fellow men do arouse in them corresponding reactions, and cause them much suffering and delay. One thing must ever be remembered. If an aspirant evokes hatred in an associate, if he arouses him to temper, and if he meets with dislike and antagonism, it is because he himself is not entirely harmless; there are still in him the seeds of trouble, for it is a law in nature that we get what we give, and produce reactions in line with our activity be it physical, emotional or mental.

There are certain types of men who do not come under this category. When a man has reached a stage of high initiation, the case is different. The seed ideas he seeks to convey, the work he is empowered to do, the pioneering enterprise he is endeavouring to carry forward, may—and often do—call forth from those who sense not the beauty of his cause and the rightness of the truth he enunciates, a hatred and a fury which causes him much trouble and for which he is not personally responsible. This antagonism comes from the reactionaries and the devotees of the race and it should be remembered that it is largely impersonal even though focussed on him as the representative of an idea. But with these high souls I deal not, but with students of the Ageless Wisdom who are learning not only that they seldom think, but that when they do they are oft thinking [484] wrongly, for they are forced into a thought activity by reactions which have their seat in their lower nature, and are based on selfishness and lack of love.

There are three lessons which every aspirant needs to learn:

First, that every thought-form which he builds is built under the impulse of some emotion or of some desire; in rarer cases it may be built in the light of illumination and embody, therefore, some intuition. But with the majority, the motivating impulse which sweeps the mind-stuff into activity is an emotional one, or a potent desire, either good or bad, either selfish or unselfish.

Second, it should be borne in mind that the thoughtform so constructed will either remain in his own aura, or will find its way to a sensed objective. In the first case, it will form part of a dense wall of such thoughtforms which entirely surround him or constitute his mental aura, and will grow in strength as he pays it attention until it is so large that it will shut out reality from him, or it will be so dynamic and potent that he will become the victim of that which he built. The thought-form will be more powerful than its creator, so that he becomes obsessed by his own ideas, and driven by his own creation. In the second case, his thought-form will find its way into the mental aura of another human being, or into some group. You have here the seeds of evil magical work and the imposition of a powerful mind upon a weaker. If it finds its way into some group, analogous impulsive forms (found within the group aura) will coalesce with it, having the same vibratory rate or measure. Then the same thing will take place in the group aura as has taken place within the individual ring-pass-not,—the group will have around it an inhibiting wall of thought-forms, or it will be obsessed by some idea. Here we have the clue to all sectarianism, to all fanaticism, and to some forms of insanity, both group and individual.

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Thirdly, the creator of the thought-form (in this case an aspirant) remains responsible. The form remains linked to him by his living purpose and therefore the karma of the results, and the ultimate work of destroying that which he has built must be his. This is true of every embodied idea, the good as well as the bad. The creator of all of them is responsible for the work of his creation. The Master Jesus, for instance, has still to deal with the thought-forms which we call the Christian Church, and has much to do. The Christ and the Buddha have still some consummating work to carry through, though not so much with the forms which embody Their enunciated principles, as with the souls who have evolved through the application of those principles.

With the aspirant, however, who is still learning to think, the problem is different. He is still prone to use thought matter to embody his mistaken apprehension of the real ideas; he is still apt to express his likes and dislikes through the power of thought; he is still inclined to use the mind stuff to make possible his personality desires. To this every sincere aspirant will bear witness.

Much concern is being felt among many of you as to the guarding of thoughts and the protection of formulated ideas. Some thoughts are ideas, clothed in mental matter and keep their habitat on the plane of thought matter. Such are the abstract conceptions and the scarcely sensed facts of the inner occult or mystic life that pass through the mind of the thinker. They are not so difficult to guard, for their vibrations are so high and light that few people have the power to clothe them adequately in mental matter, and those few are so very scarce that the risk of such statements being unwisely promulgated is not very great.

Then there are the communications involved in occult teaching. The circle of those who apprehend them is widening somewhat and these thought-forms frequently [486] take to themselves astral matter from the desire in the heart of the student to verify, corroborate, and share with the group whose knowledge is as vital as his. Sometimes this is possible, and sometimes not. If prohibited what is the method of protection then? Largely a refusing to allow the matter of the astral plane to adhere to the mental thought-form. Fight the matter out on the desire level, and inhibit that type of matter from formulating. Where no desire to speak exists, and where the striving is to prevent the gathering of the material around the nucleus, another thought-form is built up, one that intervenes and protects.

Still another type of thought-form comes forth,—the most prevalent and the one that causes the most trouble. These are the facts of information, the detailed material, the news (if so you like to call it), the basis of what may degenerate into gossip, that concerns either your work, administrative or otherwise, and that which concerns other people. How shall you prevent your mind from transmitting to another facts such as these? These are facts that have their origination in physical plane occurrence, and therein lies the difficulty. The inner facts of the occult life, and those that originate on the mental plane are not so difficult to hide. They do not come your way till your vibrations are keyed high enough for them, and as a rule, when that is so, character of sufficient stability and wisdom goes alongside. But it is not thus with a physical plane fact. What must be done? The other thoughts descend from above; these latter work upwards from the physical plane and are increased in vitality by the knowledge of the many, often of the many unwise. One kind starts nebulously on the mental plane, and only the higher type of mind can formulate it, and clothe it with matter in geometrical precision, and such a mind usually has the wisdom that refuses to clothe it in astral plane matter. Not so with the physical plane fact. It [487] is a vital entity, robed in material of the astral plane and the mental plane when first you meet and contact it. Will you vitalise it, or will you arrest it? Arrest it by a rush and wave of love for the party implicated, that envelops the thought-form and sends it back to the originator, borne on the wings of a surge of astral plane matter, strong enough to sweep through and around, mayhap disintegrating, but most certainly returning it harmlessly to the sender. Perhaps it is an evil piece of information, a lie or item of gossip. Devitalise it by love, break it in pieces by the power of a counter thought-form of peace and harmony.

Or again, it may be true, some sad or evil occurrence or deed of some mistaken brother. What then is there to do? Truth cannot be devitalised or disintegrated. The Law of Absorption will aid you here. Into your heart you absorb the thought-form you encounter and there transmute it by the alchemy of love. Let me be practical and illustrate, for the matter is of importance.

Some brother comes to you and tells to you a fact about another brother—a fact involving what the world would call wrongdoing on that brother's part. You who know so much more than the average man of the street, will realise that that so called wrongdoing may be but the working out of karma, or have its basis in a good motive wrongly construed. You add not to the talk, you do not hand on the information, as far as you are concerned the thought-form, built around the fact, has wandered into what you call a cul-de-sac.

What do you then? You build a counter stream of thoughts which (on a wave of love) you send your apparently erring brother: thoughts of kindly assistance, of courage and aspiration, and of a wise application of the lessons to be learnt from the deed he has accomplished. Use not force, for strong thinkers must not unduly influence other minds, but a gentle stream of [488] wise transmuting love. We have here three methods, none strictly occult, for those later shall be imparted, but methods available for the many.

1. The thought form kept to the mental levels, i.e. the inhibiting of astral plane matter.

2. The thought-form broken up and disintegrated by a stream of love-force well-directed.

3. The absorbing of the thought-form, and the formulation of a counter-thought of loving wisdom.

Inhibition—Disintegration—Absorption

There are three main penalties which attach to the wrong use of thought substance, and from these the aspirant must learn to save himself, and to avoid those activities; eventually this will make the process of salvation unnecessary.

1. A potent thought-form can act like a boomerang. It can return, charged with increased velocity, to the one who sent it on its mission. A strong hatred, clothed in mental matter, can return to its creator charged with the energy of the hated person, and can hence work havoc in the life of the aspirant. Hate not, for hatred returns ever from whence it came. There is a depth of truth in the ancient aphorism: "Curses, like chickens, come home to roost."

A potent desire for material acquisition will eventually return bringing inevitably that which has been desired, only to find in the majority of cases that the aspirant no longer aches for possession, but regards it as an incubus, or, in the meantime, already possesses more than he needs and is satiated and knows not what to do with all that he has gained.

A potent thought-form embodying an aspiration for spiritual illumination or for recognition by the Master may bring such a flood of light as to blind the aspirant, and make him consequently the possessor of a wealth of spiritual energy for which he is unready, and which he [489] cannot use. Again, it may attract to the aspirant a thought-form of one of the Great Ones, and thus swing him deeper into the world of illusion and of astralism. Hence the need for humility, for a longing to serve and a resulting self-forgetfulness if one is to build truly and correctly. Such is the law.

2. A thought-form can also act as a poisoning agent, and poison all the springs of life. It may not be potent enough to swing out of its creator's aura (very few thought-forms are), and find its goal in another aura there to gather strength and so return from whence it came, but it may have a vitality of its own which can devastate the life of the aspirant. A violent dislike, a gnawing worry, a jealousy, a constant anxiety and a longing for something or someone may act so potently as an irritant or poison that the entire life is spoilt, and service is rendered futile. The entire life is embittered and devitalised by the embodied worry, hatred or desire. All relationships with other people are rendered equally futile or even definitely harmful, for the worried or suspicious aspirant spoils the home circle or his group of friends by his inner poisonous attitude, governed by an idea. His relation to his own soul and the strength of the contact with the world of spiritual ideas is at a standstill, for he cannot progress onward and is held back by the poison in his mental system. His vision becomes distorted, his nature corroded, and all his relationships impeded by the wearing, nagging thoughts which he has himself embodied in form and which have a life so powerful that they can poison him. He cannot rid himself of them no matter how hard he tries or how clearly he sees (theoretically) the cause of his trouble. This is one of the commonest forms of difficulty, for it has its seat in the selfish personal life, and is ofttimes so fluidic that it seems to defy direct action.

3. The third danger against which the aspirant must [490] guard himself is becoming obsessed by his own embodied ideas, be they temporarily right or basically wrong. Forget not that all right ideas are temporary in nature and must eventually take their place as partial rights and give place to the greater truth. The fact of the day is seen later as part of a greater fact. A man can have grasped some of the lesser principles of the Ageless Wisdom so clearly and be so convinced of their correctness that the bigger whole is forgotten and he builds a thought-form about the partial truth which he has seen which can prove a limitation and keep him a prisoner and hold him back from progress. He is so sure of his possession of truth that he can see the truth of no one else. He can be so convinced of the reality of His own embodied concept of what the truth may be that he forgets his own brain limitations and that the truth has come to him via his own soul and is consequently coloured by his ray, being subsequently built into form by his personal separative mind. He lives but for that little truth; he can see no other; he forces his thought-form on other people; he becomes the obsessed fanatic and so mentally unbalanced, even if the world regards him as sane.

How shall a man guard himself from these dangers? How shall he rightly build? How shall he preserve that balance which will enable him to see truth, judge rightly, and so preserve his mental contact with his soul and with the souls of his fellow men?

First and foremost, by the constant practice of Harmlessness. This involves harmlessness in speech and also in thought and consequently in action. It is a positive harmlessness, involving constant activity and watchfulness; it is not a negative and fluidic tolerance.

Secondly, by a daily guarding of the doors of thought, and a supervision of the thought life. Certain lines of thought will not be permitted; certain old thought habits will be offset by the institution of constructive creative [491] thinking; certain preconceived ideas (note the esoteric value of that phrase), will be relegated to the background so that the new horizons will be visioned and the new ideas can enter. This will entail a daily, hourly watchfulness, but only until ancient habits have been overcome and the new rhythm established. Then the aspirant will discover that the mind is so focussed on the new spiritual ideas that the old thought-forms will fail to arrest the attention; they will die of inanition. There is encouragement in this thought. The first three years' work will be the hardest. After that the mind will be engrossed by the ideas and not by the thought-form.

Thirdly, by refusing to live in one's own thought world and by entering the world of ideas and the stream of human thought currents. The world of ideas is the world of the soul, and of the higher mind. The stream of human thoughts and of opinions is that of the public consciousness and of the lower mind. The aspirant must function free in both worlds. Note this with care. The thought is not that he must function freely, which involves more the idea of facility but that he must function as a free agent in both worlds. Through constant daily meditation he does the first. Through wide reading and sympathetic interest and understanding he accomplishes the second.

Fourthly, he must learn to detach himself from his own thought creations, and leave them free to accomplish the purpose for which he intelligently sent them forth. This fourth process falls into two parts:

1. By the use of a mystic phrase he severs the link which holds an embodied idea in his thought-aura.

2. By detaching his mind from the idea, once he has sent it on its mission, he learns the lesson of the Bhagavad Gita and "works without attachment".

These two points will vary according to the growth and status of the aspirant. Each has, for himself, to formulate [492] his own "severing phrase", and each has for himself, alone and unaided, to learn to look away from the three worlds wherein he works in his effort to push his idea of the work to be done. He has to teach himself to withdraw his attention from the thought-form he has built, wherein that idea is embodied, knowing that as he lives as a soul, and as spiritual energy pours through him so his thought-form will express the spiritual idea and accomplish its work. It is held together by the life of the soul, and not by personality desire. The tangible results are ever dependent upon the strength of the spiritual impulse animating his idea, which is embodied in his thought-form. His work lies in the world of ideas and not in physical effects. Automatically the physical aspects will respond to the spiritual impulse.