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A Treatise on White Magic - Rule Eleven - Salvation from our Thought-Forms
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 colored 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 truly, 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 focused 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.
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