The so-called ascetic is on the wrong path

There is a totally wrong idea in the world that the way to obtain the “kingdom of heaven” (to use the ordinary Christian phraseology) is by giving up your manhood; that the way to grow strong is by becoming a fool; and that the way to attain divine peace and harmony is by becoming an imbecile on the earth.

The so-called ascetic is on the wrong path. A man will never attain the kingdom of heaven merely by living on potatoes and carrots, or by sleeping only half an hour a day or night, or by lying on a bed of spikes, or by abstaining from this and doing that merely with the physical body.

The picture that I have seen of men subduing the body, as they thought, and yet with minds crooked and degraded with corruption! Wickedness is not in the body; evildoing is not of the body. The body is an irresponsible instrument of your will and of your intelligence. It is your will and your intelligence which you must train; and then you train yourselves and you become truly men and are on the pathway to human divinity.

Do not kill your personality; do not annihilate your personality in the sense of wiping it out. You have brought it into being yourself; it is a part of you, the emotional and psychical part of you, the lower mental part of you, the passional part of you, the evolutionary work of aeons upon aeons in the past. Raise the personality. Cleanse it, train it, make it shapely and symmetrical to your will and to your thought, discipline it, make it the temple of a living god so that it shall become a fit vehicle, a clean and pure channel for passing into the human consciousness the heart of the universe.

Rays of glory streaming from the god within – these rays of glory being rays of consciousness of the spirit, of the spiritual or divine consciousness. It is not the fall of the personal which frees the spiritual man; it is the raising of the personal into becoming spiritual, which is the work of evolution. This is the same thing that natural evolution in its slow agelong process is trying to accomplish – to raise the lower up to become higher – not to kill it, not to down it.

Be the holiest and noblest and purest that you can think of. Then you can forget your body. You can forget your personality which the body expresses; and by personality I mean all the lower faculties of you: the lower mental and the emotional part of you, your whims and your little this and little that. Salvage your lower portions to nobler and superior uses. When the personal shall have become transfigured; when the personal shall be able to manifest more or less fully the sublime.

Turn your gaze inward, not outward; and this does not mean to be solely introspective and to abandon extraspection. You must see in both directions. But do not seek for truth in any place except in the faculty which cognizes truth which is your inmost self.

Excerpted from Golden Precepts of Esotericism.G. de Purucker, (1874-1942) born in New York, was a leader of The Theosophical Society.

G. de Purucker