Dissolving the
Selfishness Which
Keeps a Person Tied Down to Ignorance
Keeps a Person Tied Down to Ignorance
Radha Burnier
Radha Burnier
(1923-2013), in a photo taken around the year 1980
Blinded by greed for profit and
pleasure, humanity appears to be intent
of a self-made programme of disaster.
Radha Burnier [1]
True human progress
is a journey from a state of selfishness, from attitudes and actions based on
the illusion of separateness, to another dimension - which is love. The term ‘love’, as commonly used, has little
relation to the realization of absolute non-separateness that is spiritual or
divine love. Love in the true sense abolishes the feeling of there being
‘others’. All existences are realized as elements of the one, eternal Reality.
Enlightenment means being established in such unity; the enlightened ones do
not feel they are helping others or teaching and leading others, because there
are no ‘others’. Such is the end of
human journey, beyond which, we are told, are other journeys.
At the beginning of this road is competitiveness
approximating to the instinctive behaviour of members of lesser kingdoms.
Competition for food, territory or a mate, fierce though it may be at times, is
free of evil in the case of these innocent creatures. Similar behaviour at the
human level is tarnished by the selfish thought processes leading to deliberate
destruction, deception and other evil propensities. The human being neither enjoys
the bliss, which is integral to a non-separative, unitary consciousness, nor
has the innocence and peace of subhuman creatures who are not troubled by what
they are doing or by what others do;
they just live as Nature reaches them to do.
The human dilemma ends when there is a clear awareness
of having to proceed from the separative to the loving stage. The former is
characterized by taking and the latter by giving. Dana, which is ‘charity and love immortal’, is the first of the paramitas, the virtues which enable
crossing over to the superhuman level. Universal Brotherhood, which the TS
seeks to propagate [2], includes
many wonderful qualities, one of them being the spirit of giving, not
reluctantly but with self-abandonment.
Dana involves a profoundly charitable disposition, arising
from seeing ‘the beauty and obscurity’ of those other divine fragments which
are struggling side by side with oneself. Generosity of the heart that does not
carry hurts or grievances, a nature which naturally thinks of the needs and
comforts of others rather than of oneself, a universal outlook - all this is
related to dana. These
characteristics must grow and dissolve the core of self- centredness and
pettiness which keep a person tied down to the earthly dimension.
NOTES:
[1] From the article “On the Watch-Tower”, by Radha
Burnier, in “The Theosophist” magazine,
Adyar, India, December 2002, p. 84. (CCA)
[2] “TS” - The Theosophical Society, Adyar. The statement is valid for the TS Point Loma,
the TS Pasadena, the United Lodge of Theosophists, the Independent Lodge of
Theosophists and the whole theosophical movement. (CCA)
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The article “Humanity’s Onward Path” is the first
part of the column “On the Watch-Tower”
in “The Theosophist” magazine,
December 2002 edition, Adyar, India, pp. 83-86. The text was published on the
associated websites on 23 August 2022.
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Helena Blavatsky
(photo) wrote these revealing words: “Deserve,
then desire”.
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