THE LAW OF SELF

Self-realization

”The law of self, or of self-realization, says that every being by itself – by its own knowledge and its own work – must acquire all the qualities and abilities that will ultimately lead up to cosmic omniscience and omnipotence.”

Self-realization is to realize what you potentially are. All life is in essence divine. By this we understand that all monads will some time realize their inherent potential divinity.

The law of self says that the individual’s development is the individual’s own business, that nobody other than himself can develop him. It is so because what develops is individual character, what is eternally unique in each individual.

The law of self makes it clear that man’s consciousness development depends on himself, however many incarnations it may take. The greatest obstacles to our conscious self-realization are our delusions leading us astray, our emotional illusions and mental fictions. Our totally mistaken views of life and its meaning make us misjudge ourselves and our possibilities, blind us to the meaning of our incarnation, cause us to make mistakes without number, make us give way to despondency and despair.

Self-realization requires knowledge, trust in life, trust in self, trust in the law, self-determination, and will. Man can become self-determined only when he has reached a higher mental stage, is no longer a victim of emotional illusions and mental fictions. Will is the unflinching resolution to apply the knowledge you have understood in theory. In its full extent this is not possible until the man has reached the stage of ideality. However, essential preliminaries of all these necessary qualities and abilities can be developed also at lower stages by anyone who is sufficiently resolute.

Self-realization is a long-term work even when you have begun to consciously strive for it and seek to apply the laws of life intelligently. Self-realization goes through your own experience. All develop by having experiences and working them up. Only by working up your experiences will you get insight and understanding. Only by reflecting, analysing, making efforts to be objective can you perceive the general lesson that lies hid in each personal experience.

From the lowest to the highest level, development is a series of problems that man must solve, tasks that man must do himself. A problem he does not bother to solve, solves in the wrong manner or by the aid of others, will come up again until he has solved it in the one right manner, which is the solution of his individual character, so that he has finally understood that problem of life in his own way. Only then he will be able to reach the next higher level.

Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of the Self, www.hylozoik.se

Trust in Life, Trust in Self, Trust in Law

”Anyone who distrusts life deprives himself of the power that is born from confidence in the laws of life.”

Self-realization presupposes three qualities to be effective. These are trust in life, trust in self, and trust in law. They are not possible to develop until man has reached the stage of culture, has seen the vital importance of unity, and begun to understand the meaning of life.

You must distinguish between the meaning of life and the meaning of your incarnation. The meaning of life is the development of consciousness. Man’s present incarnation is one piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle that he cannot survey. He does not remember his past and knows nothing of his future. So he cannot see the main thread of evolution running through his existence. He discovers no meaning of the single life he knows about. This incarnation can appear unbearably hard, painful, meaningless to him.

Trust in life gives man the faith that life intends all for the best even though there seems to be much that tells against this faith. Trust in life is a non-intellectual certainty of the fact that there is also a positive meaning of what happens, that life is a school for the gaining of necessary experience, that the game is never wholly lost, that defeat is never final, that there are always new opportunities and a new day, that failures and misfortunes are necessary to make us understand life and men, to draw necessary lessons for the further journey.

Trust in self has the same basis. The self knows instinctively that it has, ultimately, only itself to rely on, but it also knows that within itself it has the potentiality of everything. The self has innumerable times before managed seemingly hopeless situations and problems. Trust in self affords man the ability and courage to be himself, simple, artless, spontaneous, to dare to think, feel and act in his own way, dare to show his ignorance, dare to doubt, dare to question the “wisdom” of authorities, dare to defend freedom and what is right, dare to follow noble impulses, dare to make mistakes. Trust in self is independent of success or failure, of the illusions that break when tried. It is independent of the praise or blame of men or the individual’s own lacking ability. And it has nothing in common with conceit, self-assertion, or presumption.

Trust in law is our reliance on the immutable laws of nature and laws of life. There are people who have never studied esoterics and who have never heard the expression, “law of life”, but who nevertheless have a spontaneous confidence that tells them that there is no such thing as the “injustice of life” but that perfect justice rules the world. They do not worry for their own development or that of others but know that all work that is well done in the service of good must yield results, even though such results may be long in coming. They trust the law and do not demand to see results.

Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of the Self, www.hylozoik.se

Obstacles to Self-Realization

“Man must expect hindrances of countless kinds: physical obstacles, hereditary disposition, environment, qualities acquired, time and circumstances, national, family, and individual reaping, just to enumerate the most common ones. The only necessary thing is this: never give up. Failures never prevent success. It is by making mistakes that we learn. It is by meeting with difficulties that we develop.”

There are many obstacles to self-realization. Some of the most serious are the following ones. The separative tendency is the direct opposite of the will to unity. It manifests itself in egoism and a spiteful attitude to life and everything in life, also to oneself. This includes not just express hatred but also aggressiveness, irritation, envy, and the desire to dominate others. All these things counteract unity, as do exploitation and competition. The separative tendency of course also includes moralism.

Moralism, or the judging attitude, is due to hatred and ignorance of life. Hatred is an impersonal force as is love. A man who is filled with hatred must get an outlet for it. Who will be the victim is less important. By his mere existence a nobler man serves to remind others of their smallness. And so he becomes obnoxious to the moralists with their poor hatred.

The moralist believes that he can assess another man and then has a right to judge him. A big mistake. No man can assess another man. What does he see of the other man? The self in its present incarnation, at the most. That is all. A fraction of the individual’s acquired qualities and abilities appears. Add to this the fact that his bad reaping for the present incarnation can have forced him down to a much lower level than the one he has once attained.

His reaping gives no indication of a man’s status in evolution. Hard reaping may be due even on the highest human level, especially when the man is to reap his final reaping before he is able to pass to the fifth natural kingdom.

Other obstacles to self-realization are such as hamper the very instinct of seeking which is so important for our inner growth and renewal. Intellectual slavery appears in the fact that you dare not form your own opinion but yield to authority, do not even examine the grounds on which the claims of authority rest. Dogmas tie up the views and make it impossible to accept new, necessary ideas.

The struggle for existence and the trivialities of everyday life have a great power to engulf the man, if he does not possess strong inner counter-forces that enable him to keep his contact with the world of ideals alive. This is not to say that we should shirk the duties that the community and social life put upon us. But in all this, our striving shall be to help ourselves and others to life on a higher level than the merely trivial.

Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of the Self, www.hylozoik.se

Self-Determination

“Self-reliance and Self-determination is the courage to stand alone, the courage to say and do what needs to be said and done. It is a razor-edged path. Many people have missed it by leaving a word unsaid, an action undone, by trying to escape from difficulties or disharmonious circumstances, by leaving such problems unsolved as must be solved.”

It is the individual’s business to acquire self-determination, learn to trust his own common sense, and make himself independent of influences of any kind, no matter how “enlightened” the sources. Self-determination is the first condition for “free will”. Anyone who is dependent on the views of others is their slave.

Only the individual who has acquired self-determination is able to develop his mental consciousness into contacting causal consciousness. It is his task to liberate himself from emotional illusions and mental fictions, and that he will be able to do only by relying on his own common sense. This is no self-assertion but knowledge of the law, and entails the true humility before the problems of life.

Self-determination is, in contrast to self-assertion, objective determination, a mental state where you let facts, real factors and conditions determine. Self-assertion ensues whenever the personality with its irrelevant desires, its illusions, prejudices, dogmas, etc. asserts itself. This often happens under the self-deceptive motivation that “you must follow the highest idea you see and understand”. By this you can defend any follies whatsoever.

To let other people annoy or hurt us evidences our inability to control the consciousness content of our emotional envelope. We let them have power over us and control our consciousness. In so doing we demonstrate our lack of self-determination. A mistake that many make is to fight the content of the envelope in such states. Then it only becomes stronger, since they consider it. Let the envelope rage as it wants, and direct your attention to something else.

Self-determination means that you determine yourself, that you want to control the consciousness content of your envelopes. Disciples learn how to control a lower kind of consciousness by the next higher kind in an uninterrupted series: to control the emotional by the mental, the mental by the causal, the causal by the essential, etc.

Self-determination does not become possible to any great extent until at the stage of humanity. Self-determination makes us independent, but also tolerant, of the opinions of others.

“In order to understand much you must have strayed deep into the thorns… The warning examples do not help you; you must nearly become such an example yourself before you see it clearly.” This expresses the essential difference between theory and practice in matters of life. Anyone who does not know things from his own experience has not much use for the mere theory on how to manage problems of life.

There is a guidance in the life of man, but it is not a guidance that fosters dependence and attachment, but one that serves to develop self-reliance and self-determination. This guidance is not personal but impersonal. It demonstrates in the circumstances of life and how they turn out, a guidance of which the individual usually is not aware until, approaching the end of his life, he can survey his path of development.

Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Self,
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life Two, Esoteric Psychology,
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life Three, Mysticism,
Henry T. Laurency, The Philosopher´s Stone, The Esoteric Life View, The Law of Self
Henry T. Laurency, The Way of Man, The Second Self,
www.laurency.com

Invulnerability

”Only physical suffering may be incurable: pain, old age, disease, death. Emotional suffering can always be cured through an act of determined will, by refusing to suffer, refusing to pay attention to whatever is believed to cause suffering. That presupposes the ability to control your consciousness. That ability can be trained.”

Vulnerability is in most people a complex from childhood, founded and fomented through older as well as younger people’s habit of teasing, scoffing, deriding, etc. Anyone who is particularly vulnerable ends up at the bottom of the pecking-order. Nothing delights primitive people more than the power to inflict suffering. You deprive them of that power through invulnerability.

Vulnerability is a failing, a serious disadvantage in human intercourse. Invulnerability is the first duty common sense enjoins on yourself, is one of the necessary qualities of the real human being. You must clearly recognize the senselessness of being vulnerable, of granting the representatives of malicious ingenuity the power to destroy your balance and peace of mind. Vulnerability is in most people a complex, an effect of the illusions and delusions attached to the concept of honour. You feel outraged when others demonstrate their disrespect and irreverence.

The Stoics taught always to be prepared for any kind of trouble, not to be disturbed by it, not to worry about it, not to fight it and always to keep one’s balance through indifference. “Taking it as a trial” was their trick of life. “Non-resistance” (not putting up resistance in your consciousness, not reacting, criticizing, being annoyed, indignant, etc.) saves energy to an unsuspected degree, affords you a superior level, and is generally the wisest tactics. Trying to fight stupidity and hatred is like beheading the hydra – which symbolized the active hatred of public opinion.

Anyone who is invulnerable will never be depressed through other people’s malice and evil designs, which concern them and the law of reaping alone. To take offence is a failing. To take to heart the tactless and insolent remarks of other people is to hurt oneself. Anyone who wishes to hurt belongs to the majority of harmers and gloaters and is found on such a low level of development that everything he thinks, feels, says, or does falls below the line of what is human.

Our imagination, can strengthen suffering to the unbearable. Any painful consciousness content disappears whenever attention and memory refuse to have anything to do with it. Experience the feeling of power, will, indifference instead! All outbursts break down and hinder the concentration of power. Only he is unhappy who takes it tragically, with self-pity, and who allows himself to feel unhappy.

Invulnerability is the first step on the path to superman. You will not become invulnerable through hardness but through self-reliance; self-determination; calm, unperturbed and noble indifference; and humour. In a more profound sense, vulnerability is fear, fear of what others will think and say. Invulnerability is courage and gives you courage.

Very difficult circumstances of life have the direct purpose to teach man to appreciate, use, and cultivate his mental powers and to overcome the power of emotions through the power of thought. The ability to forget yourself and your sufferings is hard to acquire. Anyone who has learnt that art, however, has learnt to live for others and has solved the problems of his brief existence.

Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Self, www.laurency.com

Mistakes and missed opportunities

“When we see our mistakes and learn from them, their power is broken.”

We develop by having experiences and learning from them. We largely make nothing but mistakes, since we lack the knowledge of reality, life, and the laws of life, lack the ability to realize our ideals. The fact that we do not make the same mistakes as other people on lower levels do, is due to the fact that we have made the mistakes that belong to those levels and that we learnt from those mistakes. We learn by experience and only by experience, however much we believe and assert the opposite. Whatever is not included in our latent experience we can never understand right, never use right. If we learn from the experiences of others, this just shows that we have once had those experiences ourselves. We all may in new lives make almost any mistake whatever. If we have definitively had the experience, however, then we shall not make the same mistake once more.

The mistakes we make in life are not due to mere ignorance. Many of them are due to the fact that we lack those qualities which would have hindered us from making the mistakes. Mistakes are unavoidable and they need not, indeed should not, be any matter for grief, for it is by making them that we develop.

By and large the mistakes we make do not harm us as much as our successes, provided of course that we recognize our mistakes and learn from them. The satisfaction we feel when successful is a sign of existing egocentricity, that treacherous illusoriness which makes us blind to the fact that we, being first selves, are comically insignificant.

We daily miss opportunities to serve life. In our self-absorption we are blind to the possibilities of sowing a good sowing that life daily offers us. It is by seizing these small, unnoticeable, seemingly insignificant opportunities that we shall be able to discover or accept those great opportunities which most people unsuspectingly let pass them by. Through small, insignificant services, acts of kindness, we could be like sunrays in an irksome existence, make life infinitely easier, cosier, and happier for everybody. By speaking well of everybody and trying to find the merits in everybody we counteract opportunities others could seize to express hatred. What a rich life that man led of whom it may be said that the world was better as long as he lived in it.

Missed opportunities never come back. They are as many wasted chances of enriching our lives on Earth to come. Every opportunity is an offer and may be a test. The small, seemingly insignificant things are the important matters in life. Those who complain that they “never got a chance” have missed the countless small opportunities.

Of course many opportunities are missed on account of ignorance or inability. Those who come into contact with the esoteric knowledge but do not even take the trouble to examine its correctness make a mistake that they will not have the opportunity to make again in many lives.

Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Self, www.laurency.com

The Art of Living

”The art of living is tact, duty, and virtue. Tact is the inability to hurt. Duty is to fulfil one’s task. Virtue is the ‘golden mean’ between the extremes.”

The art of living includes trust in the Law; the realizations that the self is invulnerable, that everything is divine, therefore that what is natural is divine, that it is our duty to be happy, that desire is insatiable and impossible to gratify, that desire makes us unhappy, that emotional fear, worry, distrust, and doubt paralyse and darken our lives.

The art of living includes unconcern, and that is a condition for “happiness” (calm, harmony with oneself, balance, and moderation).

The art of living consists in applying the laws of life without friction. Of these laws the law of unity (Link to our text on law of unity) is the most important. If that law is applied, all the other things will follow suit. It is true that we are here in order to develop by striving. The thought of their own development is for many people the essential thing. But for those who have not reached a higher stage of development, this is an instance of a subtle kind of egoism. Only when realizing that service is the quickest way to develop will they grasp what is meant by the unity of life.

The artist in life may be happy without any such things as most people deem necessary for happiness: health, power, esteem, riches, family, social position, etc. He knows that our conceptions, not our conditions, make us unhappy.

Happiness is largely a matter of the will. Every attempt to become a sun-ray to others brings about its own reward.

The purpose of enjoyment is to afford necessary rest, relaxation, change. Beyond that, enjoyment is waste of time, and time is the thing most prized by those who have seen the meaning of life.

Those who acquire the craze for possessions will become poor. Those who acquire the freedom from desires will never be wanting. That is a law consequential on the law of reaping. (Web link to our text regarding the law of reaping.)

“If men carried the concept of brotherhood with all its implications into the life and work of every day, into all intercourse whether between the capitalist and the labourer, the politician and the people, between nation and nation, or between race and race, there would emerge that peace on earth which nothing could upset or overturn. So simple a rule, and yet utterly beyond the mental grasp of the majority.” (D.K)

By doing willingly and gladly whatever must be done we learn more than in any other way.

Everything happening to us is either redress, reaping, lesson, help, hardening, or means of liberation and often all this at the same time.

By severing the ties of life, not being able to wait until they dissolve by themselves, we refuse to learn from life and generally sow a bad sowing. Never give up! Never leave your hold! Keep your chin up however often you fail! Take it easy, and everything will be all right.

Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Self, www.laurency.com