From Suffering To Seeking

[QUOTING]

People generally protest against suffering, and the world does everything possible to neutralize and alleviate it. But for most people, suffering is the only method of making the nature-born consciousness, which is governed and colored by a wicked and undeveloped soul-state, realize that something is wrong. For the soul-state overshadows and controls the entire personality, the whole being.

Anyone who has gone through Experience -- and everyone does that in the nature-of-death -- will begin Seeking sooner or later. As soon as the Seeking life begins, the person concerned ought to begin, in the heart, to struggle against the soul-state. The moment he does so, all kinds of voices will speak to him, reactions to all the radiations and influences which until that time played a role in the heart-sanctuary and thus are on the same level as the natural soul-state. Initially, all those voices urge the candidate to try out various social, political, ethical or natural-religious experiments, with which the world is full and which are intended to make him realize the ultimate pointlessness of all efforts on the dialectical level.

And so it will come about, whether after ten years or a thousand years, or even after a sidereal year*, that a person becomes mature enough for his life to take a different direction. Then the moment dawns when gnostic reason begins to speak to him, to a certain extent. It points in the Only Direction that can lead to a solution to all problems, the direction of the soul-state, the state of the heart.

* The 25,920 years that it takes for the Sun to cycle through all twelve signs of the zodiac. Also known as the Platonic Year and/or The Great Year.

From "The Alteration of the Soul-State" The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis, Vol. 4 - Jan van Rijckenborgh

[END QUOTING]

One cannot be forced to walk the Path, even after one has become aware of its existence. No one is ready until they are ready. If there are things of this world that still hold one's attention, that one will find it difficult to let go and begin walking a path of I-demolition and self-surrender. This is why detachment is such an important part of the Path.

The Cup of Experience must be quaffed down to the last drop. One must become completely sick and tired of being sick and tired. Both the material-sphere and the reflection-sphere have to have lost their glamour and allure before a Seeker will turn away and begin to yearn for a way out. Usually, the only way for a person to reach this nadir is through a lengthy and fruitless "pursuit of happiness".

Suffering plays a key role in this. Through constant disappointment, pain and sorrow, man is persistently beaten down and made to know that "You cannot win this game, O man. The game is tightly rigged and it is rigged against you". Man sees this truth but refuses to believe that it is so. Thus, he continues to beat his head against the stone wall of earth-life, suffering, suffering, suffering; hoping all the while that "This time, things will turn out differently!".

As van Rijckenborgh states, it may take a longer or shorter period of time, but at some point, a person will weary of the shell game known as earth-life. Perhaps at that point, in desperation and surrender, the heart will cry out for Liberation from this nature-order. Then the Gnosis will come to greet him or her.

Until then, suffer.

~ g
.