LETTER XXIII
THE
MYSTERY OF DESIRE
I have
written about the hunger and thirst of disembodied men in the astral world,
and I have written about the evil astral beings who brought about this war
to satisfy their malice. They too are hungry beings and the war has given
them food. Do you know what they live on? They may live long on blood
and the exhalations of slaughter. I have seen them by myriads hovering over
a battlefield, gorging themselves on the blood that dripped from the wounds
of suffering men and from dead men.
The leaving of the dead unburied has also satisfied their
hunger. Vampire entities came up from Hungary and from other countries and
fed on the living. The awful weariness of war opened a door through which
they might pass to the life forces they craved.
“Blood is a peculiar fluid,” as Goethe
said. The life of an evil entity may be renewed for another long period of
existence if he can have blood enough.
If you stop eating the carcasses of dead animals, you will cease
to feed certain evil entities in yourselves. It is not merely for reasons of
sentiment that the pupils of the Great Masters are advised to refrain from
animal food. You are told that meat-eating feeds the passional nature. What
is the passional nature but the hungry nature that longs to feed on
something not itself? So long as you eat meat habitually you will never be
quite free from the influence of entities who live on the blood and the
other properties of meat. Eat purely, and by and by you will find yourselves
thinking purely and desiring purely.
I do not tell you to kill out all desire this afternoon, for
desire is the dynamics with which you work for even the ideal; but kill out
desire for blood and the flesh of dead animals, and all sorts of other
desires which serve no necessary purpose in your evolution will expire.
A lot of nonsense is talked about desire.
You desire to develop spiritually, you desire to do the work of the Masters;
you are not merely led along like a lamb to do the work of the Masters.
There is desire and desire. If it seems “desirable” that you shorten the
road to conscious union with the All, you will desire that union probably;
you are not likely to drift into it.
I am not talking about the violent desires of ambition. You need
not be ambitious for occult development. In fact, if you are too ambitious
for occult development you will be in danger of becoming a black magician.
But you can quietly “desire” even union with God.
All action on this plane springs from desire of some sort, and
it has been said that desire and will are the same. Perhaps they are. It has
also been said that desire relates to the temporary, and that will is some
kind of superior motive force; but I should be inclined to say that will in
its more dignified phases was merely desire for a higher thing—that is, if I
wanted to separate the two.
Music may be sublime and music may be ragtime; it is still
music. The force of the wind may fan the flame that burns your house, or it
may fill the sails of the boat that takes you across the sea to your soul’s
desire. It is still the same wind.
You may even desire to desire the higher
things. You may will to will with the Law instead of against it. Is
that not desire, too?
In advising you not to feed by blood sacrifices the elemental
forces in yourself which crave that impure food, I am not inviting you to
kill out desire. You will have to desire to purify your system from the
material of dead animals before you will willfully cease to feed on them.
The evil in you, the hungry fiery selfish nature, sucks up the blood that
passes your lips somewhat as the evil beings above the battlefields suck up
the blood that flows from the wounds of the fallen. If you have no further
use for these creatures, you can cease to feed them with blood.
You will never kill out your emotional nature by ceasing to eat
meat. You will merely purify it. The whole soul-world is a world of emotion,
and the pure beings of the elements are very emotional, but they do not feed
on blood.
Yes, mind is higher than emotion, it is
beyond emotion. You can have mind without emotion, and you can have emotion
without mind to any great degree, as in the animals; but man is made of
both. He is dependent on his middle register, his soul-desire nature, in
order to work in the soul world as a growing entity there. When you reach
the highest heaven you will be living in thought with only so much of the
desire nature as you have raised with you by memory and assimilation. You
can raise more of soul-dynamics into the highest region if you do not clog
your feet on the road by desire for bloody food. Leave that to the demons
who gorge themselves on the battlefields.
During the reign of brotherhood which I am trying to help in
bringing about, the race will subsist on a pure diet. Even now there is a
tendency toward the elimination of dead animals from the dietary.
The desires of the new race will have to be purified, their
emotions raised and intensified. The emotions of a man are much more intense
than the emotions of a lion. The emotions of a god are cosmic.
April 16.
Letter XXIV
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