Theos-Talk Archives (January 1995 Message tl00204)

Appropos paraphrasing, modernizing & condensing theosophical
texts, HPB writes:

He [the Western student] demands and expects that his "Path"
shall be engineered with all the selfish craft of modern comfort,
macadamized, laid out with swift railways and telegraphs, and
even telescopes, through which he may, while sitting at his ease,
survey the works of other people; and while criticising them,
lookout for the easiest, in order to play at the Occultist and
Amateur Student of Theosophy.  The real "Path" to esoteric
knowledge is very different.  Its entrance is overgrown with the
brambles of neglect, the travesties of truth during long ages
block the way, and it is obscured by the proud contempt of
self-sufficiency and with every verity distorted out of all
focus.  To push over the threshold alone, demands an incessant,
often unrequited labor of years, and once on the other side of
the entrance, the weary pilgrim has to toil up on foot, for the
narrow way leads to forbidding mountain heights, unmeasured and
unknown, save to those who have reached the cloud-capped summit
before.  Thus must he mount, step by step, having to conquer
every inch of ground before him by his own exertions; moving
onward, guided by strange landmarks the nature of which he can
ascertain only by deciphering the weather-beaten, half-defaced
inscriptions as he treads along, for woe to him, if, instead of
studying them, he sits by coolly pronouncing them
"indecipherable." The "Doctrine of the Eye" is *maya*; that of
the "Heart" alone, can make of him an elect.  Is it to be
wondered that so few reach the goal, that so many are called, but
so few are chosen? Is not the reason for this explained in three
lines on page 27 of ~The Voice of the Silence~? These say that
while "The first repeat in pride: `Behold, *I know*', the last,
they who in humbleness have garnered, low confess, `thus have I
heard'"; and hence, become the only "chosen."

Nicholas