Courage
Courage and love are the only indispensable virtues; even if all the others are eclipsed or fall asleep, these two will save the soul alive.
There is no greater courage than that of recognising one’s own mistakes.
Courage is a sign of the soul’s nobility. But courage must be calm and master of itself, generous and benevolent.
In true courage there is no impatience and no rashness.
Hostile Forces
Attacks from adverse forces are inevitable: you have to take them as tests on your way and go courageously through the ordeal. The struggle may be hard, but when you come out of it, you have gained something, you have advanced a step. There is even a necessity for the existence of the hostile forces. They make your determination stronger, your aspiration clearer.
It is true, however, that they exist because you gave them reason to exist. So long as there is something in you which answers to them, their intervention is perfectly legitimate. If nothing in you responded, if they had no hold upon any part of your nature, they would retire and leave you. In any case, they need not stop or hamper your spiritual progress.
Illness
Attacks of illness are attacks of the lower nature or of adverse forces taking advantage of some weakness, opening or response in the nature,—like all other things that come and have got to be thrown away, they come from outside. If one can feel them so coming and get the strength and the habit to throw them away before they can enter the body, then one can remain free from illness….
Pain & Suffering
Suffering is not something inevitable or even desirable, but when it comes to us, how helpful it can be!
Each time we feel that our heart is breaking, a deeper door opens within us, revealing new horizons, ever richer in hidden treasures, whose golden influx brings once more a new and intenser life to the organism on the brink of destruction.
And when, by these successive descents, we reach the veil that reveals thee as it is lifted, O Lord, who can describe the intensity of Life that penetrates the whole being, the radiance of the Light that floods it, the sublimity of the Love that transforms it for ever!
Difficulties – Challenges
Difficulties come because there are possibilities in you. If in life everything was easy, then it would be a life of nothing. Because difficulties come on your way it shows you have possibilities. Do not be afraid.
Doubt
Doubt is not a sport to indulge in with impunity; it is a poison which drop by drop corrodes the soul.
One of the chief functions of the physical mind is to doubt. If you listen to it, it will always find a thousand reasons for doubting. But you must know that the physical mind is working in ignorance and full of falsehoods.
Cast away from you these movements of doubt, depression and the rest which are no part of your true and higher nature. Reject these suggestions of inability, unfitness and all these irrational movements of an alien force. Remain faithful to the Light of your soul even when it is hidden by clouds.
Falsehood
How to discriminate between Truth and falsehood in the impulses of action.
Those who wish to help the Light of Truth to prevail over the forces of darkness and falsehood, can do so by carefully observing the initiating impulses of their movements and actions, and discriminating between those that come from the Truth and those that come from the falsehood, in order to obey the first and to refuse or reject the others.
… to help at the beginning, one can take as a guiding rule that all that brings with it or creates peace, faith, joy, harmony, wideness, unity and ascending growth comes from the Truth; while all that carries with it restlessness, doubt, scepticism, sorrow, discord, selfish narrowness, inertia, discouragement and despair comes straight from the falsehood.
Fear
Fear is hidden consent. When you are afraid of something, it means that you admit its possibility and thus strengthen its hand. It can be said that it is a subconscient consent. Fear can be overcome in many ways. The ways of courage, faith, knowledge are some of them.
