Experience teaches one important lesson: Our sense-conscious life is filled with symbolic language if we have the inner eye of discernment. An unescapable truth is symbolized in our daily life by the evidence that we get nothing for nothing. Everything has its price.
Immortality godhood, will not be handed to you on a silver salver; neither can any one withhold it from you, if you desire it above all things. And, altho' it has its price, yet you can not buy it. A seeming paradox, but the Initiate will see it all clearly enough when the time comes.
"He who would scale the Heights of Understanding
From whence the soul looks out forever free
Must falter not; nor fail; all truth demanding
Though he bear the cross and know Gethsemane."
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The discouraged student says to himself: "If Truth demands such sorrow and sacrifice as this, I will not serve her. It is a false god that would so try his devotees."
Have you not said it?
The toll you pay is not to the Divine Self within, but to the "keepers of the threshold," that guard the entrance to the dwelling place of the Illuminati.
Earthly lodges and brotherhoods are symbols of the higher initiations.
There is a common mistake in the idea that the invisible states of consciousness are chaotic, or radically different from the visible.
"As below, so above, and as above so below" is an aphorism constantly held before the eyes of the would-be initiate. Each of whom, must interpret and know it for himself.