Week 18 Sunday
Week 18 Sunday
Undisciplined Desires
1 Corinthians 9:19-27; 1 Timothy 1:5
We have led you to the top of our fourteen-runged ladder and trust you now find yourself victorious over the sixth enemy of the spiritual life: negativism and inferiority attitudes. You now have a positive, outgoing soul. We have been meditating on the negative side of the picture—on people who are inwardly collapsed, afraid, negative. We now turn to the other side of the picture—to those whose desires are very positive, but uncontrolled, undisciplined. If there is danger from life being negative and afraid, there is just as much danger from life being desire-assertive. You may be ruled and ruined by undisciplined desire. Therefore, the seventh outstanding enemy you must face is undisciplined desires.
There is a way of living that may be likened to the horse that lies down in harness and won’t move; and there is the other way that may be likened to the horse that runs away and breaks the harness and smashes everything. Abundant living has to find the poise between the two, something between lying down and running away; it must find the constructive but disciplined life.
Desires are the God-given forces of the personality and as such are right. Without desire life would turn back to the vegetable and vegetate. Buddha tried to make humanity victorious over the desires of life by cutting the root of desire itself, so that humanity would go out into desirelessness, into Nirvana. But you cannot cure the ills of life by reducing life; you cannot get rid of your headaches by getting rid of your head. The remedy of life is not less life, but more life. You must have enough inward life to master outer environment and circumstance.
If life is to be raised, it can be raised only through disciplined desire. The only way to get rid of a desire is to replace it by a higher desire, or to fasten the already existing desire upon higher ends and higher goals. Desires are the driving forces, and driving forces cannot be taken out of life; they must be redirected through discipline. There are three great elemental desires that have to be converted and controlled and disciplined to great ends: self, sex, and the herd.
O God, we are now at grips with the raw materials of human living; out of them we must fashion a person—your person. This raw material is recalcitrant and needs a master; be you the Master of my desires. I give the reins into your hands. Control them for me; I consent. Amen.
Week 18 Monday
The Urges Redeemed
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
We saw yesterday that the three driving urges of the personality are self, sex, and the herd. We saw that they cannot be eradicated or replaced; they must be redirected through discipline.
Take the first—self. It is the primary urge and the first to be developed. When the developing child is crossed, it expresses its displeasure in various unpleasant ways. The same thing happens in the grownup. Psychologist Alfred Adler says that the will to power, which is the assertion of the self, is the organizing primary urge; everything is organized around it.
Now what does Christianity do with this primary urge of self? Does it try to wipe it out and make one selfless? Try to crucify it and make it impotent? The answer to both questions is no! Christianity believes in the self, for the self is God-given and not to be canceled out. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). The self is to be loved, even as the neighbor is to be loved. The self is affirmed and worthy of love. It is your right and your duty to be the best possible self you can be.
Christianity therefore accepts the struggle for life that goes on in nature, expressed in the survival of the fittest: in lower nature the unfit are eliminated. If they do not excel they are exterminated. This is a hard and ruthless law; and Christians have drawn back from accepting such a process, questioning whether such a merciless manner of survival can have anything to do with God. It seems utterly at variance with the plan of redemption. But I am coming more and more to feel that this ruthless process is redemption—it redeems those that fit into the physical environment and eliminates those that will not. In a physical environment, the physically best survive and pass on their fine physical qualities to the next generation. This is right. For if the law were otherwise, the survival of the unfit would end in physical degeneration. One generation would pass on its unfitness to the next generation, and so on to extinction.
My Lord, I see that your school is strict, but the end is redemption. Your laws, however uncompromising, are our salvation. They are made for us, and they mean to make us. Help us then not to chafe at them as enemies, but to embrace them as friends. For all your laws are your loves. I thank you. Amen.
Week 18 Tuesday
The Kingdom Our Real Environment
Luke 17:21; Acts 17:28; Romans 11:36; Ephesians 4:6
Yesterday we saw that we must accept the struggle in nature that produces a superior physical self. The end of this struggle is redemption from weakness and from unfitness. While we must accept this fact, nevertheless the danger lies in taking the laws of adaptation to a physical environment and making them the laws of adaptation to a moral and spiritual environment. The laws of struggle and adaptation to a purely physical environment do not fit a moral and spiritual environment, and when applied to this higher environment they break down and cause confusion. For the moral and spiritual world in which we live has its own laws of adaptation and survival. When we act in accordance with these laws, we survive and develop; when we don’t, we decay and are utterly destroyed.
Christianity, founded on the laws of the kingdom of God, believes in the survival of the fittest: In a moral and spiritual universe, the morally and spiritually fit survive, and pass on their spiritual and moral qualities to the next generation. This law of the survival of the fittest and the elimination of the unfit operates before our very eyes.
The environment into which humanity must fit, and to which we must adapt, is therefore the kingdom of God. When we fit into this kingdom, we live; and when we don’t, we are self-frustrated; the structure of our beings breaks down. In the words of Scripture, we “perish” (see Luke 8:24). Here and now the process of perishing takes place, and the life forces break down through what we call evil. A person who committed suicide in England left this note: “Many explanations will be given of this act, but I think it is this: I see that it is the result of a private war going on inside myself, and which cannot be solved.” The war that was going on inside him was his war with the kingdom, the laws of which were written into the constitution of his being; and when he was at war with the kingdom, he was at war with himself. That war could not be solved on his basis; hence, suicide.
My Lord and my God, your kingdom is written into my flesh and blood and bone and nerve cell. How can I escape it? For if I do, I escape from life itself. Help me therefore to come to terms with that kingdom, and hence with life. For I would live and live fully. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 18 Wednesday
The Christian’s Survival Value
Psalms 1:6; 37:7-9; John 3:16
If we accept the law of the survival of the fittest in regard to the moral and spiritual life, we then redeem and make usable the parables of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30) and the pounds (Luke 19:11-28). Otherwise they have no meaning; they are extraneous to the Christian system. But if we accept this law, then they become an integral part of a consistent system. Those parables are terrible. Those who do not develop the talent or the pound have them taken away. However, they are no more terrible than life itself, for that is what life does. If we do not develop any faculty or organ, it will degenerate; it is taken away.
The acceptance of the law of the survival of the morally and spiritually fit also redeems and makes possible the ideas of heaven and hell. These ideas have been lost to this generation, for heaven and hell have usually been taught as something extraneously given by God. No wonder this generation lost these ideas! They were morally indefensible. But teach heaven and hell as inherent results and they come back as natural corollaries.
Good, by its very nature, is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating; evil, by its very nature, is self-disintegrating and self-destroying. A judge sentenced a drinking man to go and look in the mirror. After the man took one look at his face, he immediately sat down and took the pledge. The signs of disintegration were obvious and compelling. But the signs of disintegration on the face were only the outer signs of a total disintegration, the outer registration of an inner fact.
Goodness within does register in the face, however. An unruly young artist, noting the change in his mother’s face, asked her the reason. She said, “Your mother has prayed much for you.” To which he replied, “Well, it makes fine lines.”
Response to the kingdom of God does make fine lines, for it makes fine lives. It is the way to live. Not to respond to the kingdom makes bad lines—lines that turn down, for it makes bad lives—lives that turn down toward disintegration and, if persisted in, final destruction.
O my Lord, I have taken discipline from too many things. I have obeyed this and that. Result? I have become this and that—and nothing. But now the needle of my life, oscillating in many wrong directions, comes at last to rest in you and your kingdom. It shall be first and always. Amen.
Week 18 Thursday
The Undisciplined Self
Romans 1:24; 15:1-2; 2 Corinthians 5:15; Philippians 2:4
Now we see that the three urges within us—self, sex, and the herd—must be disciplined, and must be disciplined to one thing: the kingdom of God. Otherwise life will be like a brush heap instead of a tree. A brush heap has no central organizing principle, and is a decaying mass destined to the dust. A tree has an organizing principle, and its branches fit into that principle. Hence a tree is a growing organism, destined to the skies.
The self, then, must know its Master. The self as a servant to the kingdom of God is rhythmical and harmonious and adequate; the self as a servant to itself is halting and inharmonious and incompetent, its own slave. A woman who is entirely egocentric, and who has therefore had a nervous breakdown, and is entirely miserable, said to me recently, “I spent all afternoon going from room to room before I got one to suit me, and now that I have selected one, I don’t like it.”
I gently replied, “The disorder is within you. You don’t like anything, because you don’t like yourself.” Her self was out of place on the throne, and the kingdom of her personality was in disorder.
Dr. Fritz Kunkel says:
Life does not allow egocentricity to put its own order, which life regards as disorder, in place of the natural rhythm. That is why every natural capacity for accomplishment, no matter how skillfully developed, is restricted sooner or later by egocentricity. Only the objectively oriented individual is unrestricted in accomplishment because he does not come into conflict with life’s demands.*
The self, then, must be disciplined to die. It must die as first, in order to live as second. That is why at the center of the kingdom is a cross. You must go through spiritually what Jesus went through physically. You must die and be buried in order to experience resurrection into freedom and fullness of life.
O Christ—I understand. The whole meaning of life is made plain. I am to follow you to no trifling cross, but to this decisive cross on which I shall die—die to my own futile self-will in order to live to your will; die to my own petty self in order to live to your free and strong self. Help me then from this moment to discipline my life to your will. Amen.
* Let’s Be Normal! (New York: I. Washburn, 1935), 97-98.
Week 18 Friday
Attention, Meekness, Power
1 Timothy 1:15, 16; 6:11-14; 2 Timothy 2:15
One of the most radiant persons I know, whose life story I shall tell later, has overcome an invalidism stretching back for forty-four years, and has made of her bed a throne. Her room is the confessional of the city. She told me that the three words she is living by this year are: “attention, meekness, power.” She could not have fastened upon three more important words. So vital are these words that we are going to use them as three steps to a disciplined self. (1) Attention. What gets your attention is all important, for whatever gets your attention gets you. If you give self your primary attention, self will be drawn to the center of your consciousness, and everything else will be arranged around self. “Arranged” around it? Disarranged around it! For to have self at the center is to have a cancer at the center, because cancer cells make other cells contribute to them instead of making themselves contribute to other cells. A self-attentive person lives in a state of self-reference. “How will this affect me? What do I get out of this?” Such a person is disliked by others and is disliked by self.
Decide, then, what shall have your primary attention. Decide, as you go into the shrine of your heart, to what you are going to bend the knee. If the kingdom of God has your allegiance, then make your loyalty absolute. Don’t say yes and no. Don’t be what my friend calls a “Yes, but-ter,” “I’ll do it, but __.” Let there be no buts anywhere. Put Christ once and for all at the center of your attention. Then you live in a state of Christ-reference instead of a state of self-reference. To shift the very basis of your life in this way will not be easy; the self will wriggle and twist and beg off and compromise, will do everything except abdicate. A pastor arose in our Ashram and said, “I see what I need, and I see that I don’t want what I need.” He still loved himself first, even amid the wreckage caused by that fact of self-love. But this resolve to center Christ in your life is a decisive decision. It is a decision that decides all decisions, a seed decision.
O my God, I have been out of focus, and all life’s pictures have been blurred and distorted. But now I am getting into focus, and my pictures are becoming clearer—life looks different, for I am looking upon it differently. My eye is now single, and my whole body is now full of light. I am grateful—grateful. Amen.
Week 18 Saturday
The Meek Inherit the Earth!
Psalms 22:26; 25:9; 37:11; Matthew 11:29
We saw yesterday that the first step in self-discipline is “attention.” We come now to (2) meekness. How we have shied away from that word! We have thought of meekness as weakness. We have purposelessly misunderstood the word, for we have been afraid of what it would demand of the self, namely surrender. For meekness is just that: surrender.
The scientist is meek, and therefore gains power over nature. The scholar is meek, and therefore gains power over knowledge. The Christian is meek, and therefore gains power over the universe. Jesus stated this truth thus: “Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5). His words seem absurd: “inherit heaven,” yes; but not the earth, here and now. But the meek do. They are the only ones who do inherit the earth.
To whom do the stars belong? To the Siseras who aspire to conquer the earth and heaven? “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera” (Judg. 5:20 KJV). The stars belong to the astronomers who meekly surrender to them and enter the kingdom of the stars through that surrender; the stars belong to them. Who owns the mountains? Those who have enough money to bring the mountains under their control? No. The mountains belong to the geologists who love them, surrender to them, gain their secrets, and are at home with them. Who inherits the world of the mind? Those who say they are free to do as they like with their minds? No. Such people literally lose their minds! The mind belongs to the psychologists who meekly surrender to the laws of the mind, who learn of the mind’s ways; they inherit the world of the mind.
Jesus was right—as always—the meek do inherit the earth. Literally, the word is “the disciplined shall inherit the earth.” Those who bring themselves under the great Discipline, the Discipline of the kingdom, inherit the earth. Robert Browning expresses the same thought: “Who keeps one end in view makes all things serve.”* The one end is the kingdom. All things serve those who serve the kingdom.
O God, I now begin to feel the meaning of being disciplined. It is getting into my blood and brain cells—into me. When I shall have become a disciplined soul, I shall be free. Help me to emerge as a disciplined spirit—disciplined for the highest by the Highest. Amen.
* “In a Balcony,” 1855.