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And should the student’s preparation not have rendered him strong enough to be able to say: “I will not remain at this point, but will persistently work my way upward toward the higher ego,” he will grow weak and will shrink back dismayed before the labor that lies before him.
Work in two dimensions by reason of its greater simplicity should naturally precede the complications involved in producing the completely modelled forms of nature, and therein the argument for its use in the early stages of the student’s development is a strong one. Breadth, so often accountable for mystery, leads to suggestiveness.
It is this greater Guardian of the Threshold who now becomes the ideal he must strive to resemble, and when the student has acquired this feeling he will have risen to that important stage of development in which he will be in a position to recognize who it is that is really standing before him as that “greater Guardian.” For henceforth, in the student’s consciousness, the Guardian is gradually transformed into the figure of the Christ, whose Being and intervention in the evolution of the earth have been dealt with in a foregoing chapter.
Now, when man leads his thoughts away from the world of the physical senses, he misses the corrective influence of this latter. If his thought is not able to be its own mentor, it will be as unsteady as a will-o’-the-wisp. Consequently, the student’s thought must be exercised in such a way that its course and object are self-determined.
“I can assure you that I was not long in carrying out the student’s instructions, and never have I trod so lightly on the ground as I did that day. The student, as soon as he saw me half-way up the tree, shouted out, ‘Here it comes! Oh, this is awful—just as I told her all about it! Oh dear, oh dear!’
Here one’s own activity of soul must be called to mind,—that which had obtained the conception of growth and decay from the image of the plant. The plant must now be allowed to vanish altogether from the consciousness, and the attention be concentrated entirely upon the student’s own inner activity. It is only such exercises as these that help us to rise to inspiration.
Would he never learn to know the difference between ils ont and ils sont? Irving made his corrections in a neat, pretty little hand, which of itself seemed to reprove the student’s awkward scrawl. He turned then to his own studies, which he was pursuing in a tattered volume of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the English Common Law.
It is impossible to know anything in the occult sense of the present and future of human or planetary evolution without understanding that evolution in the past. For, that which presents itself to the occult student’s observation when he watches the hidden events of the past, contains at the same time everything that he can learn of the present and future.
In order to settle this point to the student’s satisfaction no better proof could be suggested than that he paint in black and white a simple landscape motif, with no attempt to create a focus, with no suppression of the corners and no circuit of objects—a landscape in which ground and sky shall equally divide the interest.
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