Leo

The Attitude Toward Initiatic Teaching

The following considerations are addressed to those who not only have read what I have explained so far, but who, when confronted with the transmission of teachings, also have felt and willed.

In the order of esoteric knowledge, one cannot remain passive before what is received, which is given not for information’s sake, but in order to lead others to similar inner achievements. Whatever is communicated, if it is received with the right spiritual attitude, has the power to transform one’s essence. Those who overcome an obstacle in this order of things do not do it for their own sake alone; there is an occult bond among human beings that allows others to partake in the spiritual achievements of an individual, even if such a person remains aloof, invisible, and silent. But when the path being followed is expressed through thoughts, this occult and natural process of participation is brought into the light of knowledge and free individuality. Thus it is necessary to learn to receive it in the right way.

One should not react and grasp what is being communicated only with the mind (this is the first obstacle that meets esoteric teachings, and which can arrest and neutralize them all); rather, one’s thoughts must generate living images, and these in turn must be felt. What I mean is that the state that I have described must be imagined as taking shape in us—almost as if we “invented” it—and at the same time we must possess and maintain a corresponding state of feeling in our hearts.

I am not talking about some definite feeling, as usually occurs in ordinary life, but about the pure and simple attitude of feeling, of listening with the ear of the heart in inner calmness; this is very different from the emotional, instinctive, and immediate reactions that make people rejoice or suffer as they identify with them and get lost in them. This is a special attitude that has to be practiced. As a starting point, try to remember and to reproduce through the imagination a certain emotion experienced in given circumstances. Then, try to abstract either these circumstances and the object that occasioned it, or else its definite coloring of pleasure or pain. You will find that something remains—an intense and yet calm emotional state, collected almost as a “warmth” within the heart. This exercise is very important and is not as difficult to practice as it may first seem.

This purified manner of feeling preserves one’s freedom before the content of the experience, and at the same time shifts its content from the brain to the more subtle centers. There, the teaching is internalized and appropriated, reemerging in a form similar to the act of remembering.¹⁶⁰ The message no longer seems to come from the outside, but seems to arise from inside us, shedding light on and giving value to our inner experiences, the significance of which had eluded us up to that point.

Moreover, it is necessary to have at the same time, and in a distinct fashion, a willful attitude within our interiority. But even the will must have a special meaning; it must be independent from every stimulus and every goal. We may compare it to that which one feels while preparing to break a rigid object, the muscular tension preceding the movement itself. Here, too, we may utilize the imagination as in the case of feeling, and abstract from the meaning of an act of will that is recalled either the determining cause that awakened it or else the direction toward which it was addressed. It will also be possible to utilize the memory of the state of energy preceding the discharge in which it was transformed into action and material movement.

The will, when caught in this condition, is experienced as a state that fills the arms and the lower half of one’s body with life. Through the corresponding attitude, the content of a teaching is received by other subtle centers of our being. The inner experience will be very different from that which I characterized earlier as a “remembering.” Here it will instead appear as if a strong current from another source of energy erupted and coupled itself with our own, multiplying it.

Receiving as thinking needs to be simultaneously integrated with receiving as feeling and with receiving as willing, activating centers that in ordinary conditions remain dormant. These are distinct states, although simultaneous.

This may appear difficult. In reality many people can, through practice, attain the state in which one perceives, feels, and wills in three different zones of one’s own being; this marks the first emancipation from the laws of the physical world, and a first realization of our unity with the subtle body in the waking state.

All this represents a process of inner development that, once attained, leads to both a complete revision of the attitude toward life and the experience of the sensible world in general. Other evidences arise, other systems of reference. A new discipline in one’s life and behavior sets itself up on an entirely new basis; moreover, one’s thought begins to form itself, in consequence, as an orientation of knowledge, which takes on the value of a doctrine.

The process is in inverse to that of ordinary life, in which theory precedes practice and experience. Here we first find an inner action, the free initiative that leads to things that are not thought, supposed, or believed, but rather experienced; only at a second stage does one formulate a doctrine that is justified and ordered only on the basis of these effective and inner experiences. Esotericism does not require any act of faith. Rather, it requires goodwill and a spirit free of a priori assumptions and prejudices—and yet, this is precisely where the difficulty lies. It is useless to discuss this or that, since the basis of a discussion cannot be the same; likewise, in this field it is useless to create conviction solely through discursive argument. Rather, we should try to accept and to operate, and to observe with objectivity whatever ensues from the acceptance and from the action within the inner domains of our being. Thus one’s criteria and knowledge will be a result and not a starting point.

It will be useful, further on, to see what each one may conclude in regard to esoteric doctrine on the basis of the lines of experiment that I have described so far. This, however, should not be understood as an a priori intellectual view, but rather as an a posteriori organization of knowledge.

In this domain, we must avoid ending up in rigid formulas. It is necessary to leave a certain margin of indeterminacy, so that the spirit may flow and develop a somewhat creative and synthesizing initiative, bringing into action faculties that are left inactive when comprehension is merely through logical schemata. Words must contain something more than what they habitually express, and the attention of the reader or listener must be refined so as to “fix” not only the sense, but also what the sense gradually calls forth as a secret resonance in ourselves. That which is tidily encapsulated in a logical formula is dead for the life of the spirit.