Learn Like Fire Not Like Water – (1686)

Fire Rises Up

Fire rises up, it is always higher than it is wide. The way of fire is to rise up to the heights, to liberate energy and consciousness to reach purity (energy and consciousness are purity). So in life the way of fire in us would be to learn with consciousness, to seek understanding with our consciousness. To study and to work so to reach consciousness.

The way of fire is a very good way because it reaches up to the spirit and it allows for a quick learning process. There however is another way, which is the way of water.

Water Spreads Out - Breadth

There is also the way of water, which is valid but is longer, more difficult and slower. If we observe water we see that it starts off pure in the high mountains and then descends, down the mountain side and down through the many cracks and crevices into the dark and cold ground. It absorbs all the things that it comes across along the way, staining, marking and modifying it from its original pure state. Later it collects in a puddle or a river or the sea or the ocean and there by the action of the sun it evaporates and is drawn up high into the clouds where it is purified and released as pure water once again onto the mountain tops, where it receives many pure and spiritual cosmic forces.

We in life too can learn like this, we begin innocently and simply and then gradually get more complicated and degenerated and further away from our pure state. In the process we suffer greatly and we begin to slowly learn that this is not the way and that the right order of things is the opposite. So we begin to change and we slowly end up purifying ourselves until we reach our simple, innocent and pure original state.

This can happen in the in the psychological work when we are really slow and only half or a quarter wanting to work on the dissolution of the ego, and it can happen like this on a very broad and general scale when we enter into the involution.

Dangerous Though

This way is dangerous though, because it can take too long and we run the danger of getting stuck and not making it out because it is too late or we don’t have enough energy left to do it etc. The way of fire is safer.

Conclusion

We must go the way of fire. The path uses principally the way of fire, But it does use both water and fire but in a slightly modified way.

There is always a descent before an exaltation. That is before we can rise up to the heights of a mountain we have to descend into its depths so to know its depths, which is to know its nature when we apply duality to it. Doing this we get to know both sides and then with the knowledge of both we can arrive at the third which is the truth and consciousness. Having gained dominion over its depths we have the right to know and ascend to its heights but not before then.

End (1686).