Inner life and outer World

 

 

I have given sufficient and explicit explanation that seekers can only be ‘my’ pupils insofar as they adhere, in direction and self-determination of their striving, to the message, instructions and teachings laid down in my books, without wanting to see anything else in my own person than the appointed mediator and fashioner of the insights and advice offered here.

 

This is a purely spiritual teacher-pupil relationship in which I bear eternal responsibility for every seeker who takes his direction from my teaching in such a way that he gains the genuine right to call himself my ‘pupil’.

 

This is not the equivalent of the ‘sense of responsibility’ towards their faithful felt and expressed by all conscientious pastors within religious communities, – it is rather the case that my responsibility for the seeker who precisely follows the advice I have imparted in order to enter ‘into the spirit’ consists of an indissoluble obligation which continues to make its demands in future conditions after life on earth and is not fulfilled until the seeker who has entrusted himself to my teachings has achieved what I could promise him. –

 

And yet I must ask you: – to differentiate precisely the things I describe in my books as spiritually possible and capable of being experienced under certain, clearly shown preconditions, and which I only present in order to describe the various levels of spiritual experience, which without question can not already be reached by all men on earth, – and those things I, clearly and without fear of misunderstanding, want to see attained by every spiritual pupil during his life on earth.

 

It is necessary for me to allow the seeker to partake in a lively way in experiencing the higher levels of ability of spiritual experience which may still be inaccessible to him here on earth, thus enabling him to find his own ‘direction’, but this certainly does not mean that I could promise him reaching this ability of experience in the spirit.

 

Everything I show to be accessible presumes a certain level, to a greater or lesser degree, of development of the substantial spiritual organism; in every passage in my books treating attainable experiences in spiritual life I also show what must already have been attained in order to rise to the next higher level of appropriate spiritual experience.

 

After a receptive reading of my elucidations the pupil within the spirit can himself recognise precisely where he stands, although he must, of course, beware of refashioning to his advantage the characteristics of the relevant ability for experience which I give unequivocaly.

 

In earthly matters someone can at times pretend to have grades of perfection so that others think he possesses them, – but in spiritual life every attempt to ‘pretend to have higher qualities’ is bound to fail abjectly, since anyone prepared to engage in this pretence, merely – deceives himself.

 

The spiritual level he has really gained emerges only from the ability for experience in the substantial eternal spirit he has reached.


(Excerpts from the chapter ‘Inner life and outer world’ pages 594-603 )

 





Bô Yin Râ