The Theosophical Path Illustrated Monthly Volume 1, July-December, 1911
Religion
The Theosophical Path Illustrated Monthly Volume 1, July-December, 1911
Theosophy -- Periodicals
The sensual appetites are impelling because the creative quality
upon the physical plane counterfeits the unity of masculine and
feminine principles in the final perfection of human consciousness.
The attraction of the sexes depends upon an awakening not only to the
qualities of the opposite, but also to an exaltation of the lover's
sense of his or her own manhood or womanhood. Exercised merely for
gratification the lower appetites fill the indulger's world with
insistent desires, capable of leading to degrading depths. But when the
creative energy is consciously expended along the uplifting lines of
noble and altruistic endeavor it arouses in all the auto-creative sense
of power, which, reproductive in its own right, has the satisfying
sense of attainment. Unselfish love so far awakens the higher nature
to its own richness and strength and beauty that its royal impulse to
give would sacrifice the personal self in protecting and idealizing the
beloved.
The temptations of ambition spring from a love of power--the power of
knowledge, of courage, of beauty, of strength, of influence--those
things which arouse the possessor to an enlarged or intensified sense
of himself. That the ruling personal ambition too often sacrifices the
greatest elements of the nature to obtain the gratification of seeming
greatness does not discount the fact of the Real Self which sacrifices
its lesser desires to be great.
Back of all counterfeits must be the genuine coin to give the false
its spurious value. So beyond the many byways of sense and sensation
wherein humanity seeks to feel and to think and to do more there is
the sunlit highway of the natural soul-life wherein one grows more
conscious of his divine power and possibilities. Normal growth during
incarnation is not found in a repeated round of sensational climaxes,
but in a progressive journey with an ever-expanding horizon where the
soul dominates the nature forces within and without the body. The child
who learns to know the divine reality of his dual nature inevitably
comes to find that "pleasure within himself" that is satisfying in its
expansive sense of power and beauty and largeness.
That the child is incapable of realizing so profound a truth as that of
his divine origin is questioned by a world psychologized with centuries
of false teachings of natural depravity, etc. But in the teaching of
the dual nature in the Râja Yoga training that calls upon the higher
side to master and utilize the force of the lower impulses, the reality
of innate power becomes the satisfying keynote of daily life. In the
plastic period of child growth, he should be spared the usual external
distractions while acquiring the habit of looking within to "find
himself." Protection from the taint of artificial life is no more
enervating than the suitable care the gardener gives to seedlings while
they take firm root for future growth and resistance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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