[Drifter]

"What is The Root of All Evil?"
Misuse of the Free Will


I have often had it asked of me how it is that divinity is in and behind all things, and yet, at the same time there are all the horrible things that take place even in human life: wars, earthquakes, whatnot. These things are but proofs of cosmic activity. It is not the cosmic activity that is to blame; it is we, the channels through whom the cosmic forces travel and work, misdirected by us, by our free will -- relatively free at least by our choice, our choosings: sweet bells jangling out of tune, but they are bells just the same.
Everyone knows that a man who abuses his body will pay for it in suffering and disease. These things exist; and the disease and illness and sufferings are born from the original harmonies, if you please, otherwise there would be no contrast. They do not disprove the cosmic harmony; rather they prove that somewhere along the line somebody, something, has abused the god-given privilege of cooperation with the divine harmonies. When a man so cooperates in fullness, then he is what we call a Buddha, a Christ, or an avatara. But when a man does not so cooperate and persistently uses his free will, born of the divine itself, to make disharmonies where it is his duty to preserve and perpetuate harmonies, what happens? It depends upon the plane where his mind is at work. In any case, if instead of following the upward path he chooses the downward, he goes down and down and down to the Pit. And this simply means the following: just as by continual abuse of your health you can ruin it and get a body which will be diseased, perhaps for more than one incarnation on earth, so with your mind, and so with your will. If you persistently fill your soul with thoughts of disharmony, hatred, evil, you will corrupt the inner fabric of that soul, and it will take on the pattern of your thoughts. You will be a workman shaping your inner self, making your future life to be according to the pattern your thoughts and feelings have given to yourself. The result is that as evil is always constrictive, the inner fabric of you, your free will, becomes less and less competent, more and more inharmonious with itself, weaker and weaker in power and energy, even in imagination and in feeling, because you are constantly becoming more and more constricted instead of widening and becoming universal. The result is that if you persist on this path downwards you will become as low as the beasts. You will have lost your humanity. Nobody will be to blame except you yourself. That is what we mean when we speak of dropping into the Pit. The opposite of this is a continuous growth in faculty and power, by inclusiveness, by expansion, until we become finally divine, cosmic in our minds, in the reaches of our intellect, cosmic in our sympathies, widening with the universe.