Instructions for Spiritual Living by Paul Brunton

Author:Paul Brunton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Self-Help
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

The Probations and Tests of the Aspirant

TO MASTER DESIRES, to overcome passions, and to ennoble emotions: self-reform and self-purification are the first practical fruits of philosophy. Thus an interval of long probation must inevitably pass before the results of this effort can become apparent in thought and action. The task before us is really a tremendous one, requiring our whole nature and our best mind. Anything less will bring us so much nearer to failure. And its significance is so vast that failure will, in turn, bring a like measure of mental suffering. We may believe that we have already achieved certain things, but we should remember: first, the French proverb that the better is the enemy of the good; second, that whether our progress is genuine or whether, being so, it can maintain itself, is a matter that still needs to be ascertained. Our fidelity to the higher values and how far our spirituality is real or supposed, are sure to be put to appropriate tests at intervals of our mystical career. All our earlier experiences and preceding struggles, victories, and defeats have been a training for them. Hence we may expect temptations to accompany us at one period and tribulations at another. We hardly know what weaknesses are waiting beneath the surface of our conscious life, ready to rise above it when opportunity offers.

In some great mystery schools of antiquity, it was the task of the Grand Master to administer the necessary tests and arrange the fateful ordeals that determined the fitness of a candidate for entry into any of the successive degrees of initiation. The Egyptian hierophants applied their tests of the worthiness of candidates before granting them the enlightenment of initiation. The ordeals were divided into five ascending grades. Each corresponded to a different element—earth, water, air, fire, and spirit. Candidates for initiation into esoteric degrees were made by the hierophants to enter places that tried their nerves and to undergo ordeals that tested their courage. They also brought the candidates into surroundings and among individuals where powerful temptations to their sensual desires had to be overcome. But those schools have perished and their methods have perished with them. They would not indeed suit the conditions of the modern world.

The farther we advance, the more formidable and less recognizable will be the obstacles, trials, and temptations we will have to overcome. Men and women, circumstances and situations, will be used as bait to tempt us from the quest’s moral ideals or disciplinary phases, from its intellectual goals and ideological truths. One of the strange methods used by the powers to test us will be to arrange coincidences in our external life-cycle. Thus, within a short time—sometimes within a single day of our solemn renunciation of a certain thing, it will be offered to us! Such coincidences may be evil or good. In the very moment when we are powerfully attracted by some desirable thing or person, we are to renounce it deliberately and heroically. In the

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