Daily Meditation: Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Instincts - can only be controlled if given a spiritual direction

07/25/2012

An age-old instinct impels humans to give free rein to their impulses, however base. Over time, they have felt the need to give themselves a few moral laws, not because they liked them, but because they found certain advantages in doing so. If, for example, theft and all kinds of acts of aggression are forbidden and punished, society feels safer. But this state of ‘morality’ is still far from perfect; humans are always trying to arrange their affairs at the expense of others and to get rid of them whenever possible. Of course, they rarely do this on the physical level, for they risk being caught and punished. They do it on other levels, where they run much less risk: they steal other people’s thoughts and feelings, or else they tarnish their reputation, dishearten them or tear them to shreds when they speak or write about them. So, the same instincts are given expression and the same crimes committed, but in subtler forms and subtler spheres. As long as people are not taught Initiatic Science so that they can learn how to give their instincts a spiritual direction, their lower impulses will remain destructive forces that will always achieve their aims.