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Lesson II: More Light on the Path.249
lacks, and causes the old relative views to drop from us like the withered
leaves from the rose. As the writer of “Light on the Path” so beautifully says:
“This giant weed cannot flourish there; this blot upon existence is wiped out
by the very atmosphere of eternal thought.”
5. Kill out all sense of separateness.
6. Kill out desire for sensation.
7. Kill out the hunger for growth.
8. Yet stand alone and isolated, because nothing that is embodied, nothing that
is conscious of separation, nothing that is out of the eternal can aid you. Learn from
sensation, and observe it; because only so can you commence the science of selfknowledge,
and plant your foot on the first step of the ladder. Grow as the flower
grows, unconsciously, but eagerly anxious to open its soul to the air. So must you
press forward to open your soul to the eternal. But it must be the eternal that draws
forth your strength and beauty, not desire of growth. For, in the one case, you
develop in the luxuriance of purity; in the other, you harden by the forcible passion
for personal stature.
Here again are we confronted with a set of paradoxical precepts, the
first three of which tell us to kill out certain things, and the fourth of which
then proceeds to tell us (apparently) to do the very things which we have
just been advised not to do. This is another example of the Divine Paradox
which underlies all occult teachings—the two sides of the shield. Read what
we have said on this subject, in Lesson i. What we have said there applies to
nearly all of the precepts of “Light on the Path.”
In the fifth precept we are told to “Kill out all sense of separateness.” The
eighth precept gives us the reverse side of the shield: “Yet stand alone and
isolated, because nothing that is embodied, nothing that is conscious of
separation, nothing that is out of the eternal, can aid you.” Here we have
two vital truths imparted to us—and yet the two are but different sides of
the same truth. Let us consider it.