Produced by Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland, Edna Badalian and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
The present edition of LIGHT ON THE PATHis a verbatim reprint of the 1888 edition(George Redway, London) in which later editionthe NOTES by the Author first appear. TheCOMMENTS, which are not in the 1888 edition,are here taken directly from Lucifer, Volume I,1887-8, where they were first published.
Also in this volume we reprint verbatim theoriginal edition (1887) of THROUGH THEGATES OF GOLD by the same Author, togetherwith a commentary by William Q. Judge takenfrom his magazine, The Path, March, 1887.
*Light on the Path*
A Treatise
Written down by M.C.
with Notes by the Author
These rules are written for all disciples:
Attend you to them.
Before the eyes can see, they must be incapableof tears. Before the ear can hear, itmust have lost its sensitiveness. Before thevoice can speak in the presence of the Mastersit must have lost the power to wound. Beforethe soul can stand in the presence of the Mastersits feet must be washed in the blood ofthe heart.
1. Kill out ambition.
2. Kill out desire of life.
3. Kill out desire of comfort.
4. Work as those work who are ambitious.
Respect life as those do who desire it. Behappy as those are who live for happiness.
Seek in the heart the source of evil andexpunge it. It lives fruitfully in the heart ofthe devoted disciple as well as in the heart ofthe man of desire. Only the strong can kill itout. The weak must wait for its growth, itsfruition, its death. And it is a plant that livesand increases throughout the ages. It flowerswhen the man has accumulated unto himselfinnumerable existences. He who will enterupon the path of power must tear this thingout of his heart. And then the heart will bleed,and the whole life of the man seem to be utterlydissolved. This ordeal must be endured:it may come at the first step of the perilousladder which leads to the path of life: it maynot come until the last. But, O disciple, rememberthat it has to be endured, and fastenthe energies of your soul upon the task. Liveneither in the present nor the future, but inthe eternal. This giant weed cannot flowerthere: this blot upon existence is wiped out bythe very atmosphere of eternal thought.
5. Kill out all sense of separateness.
6. Kill out desire for sensation.
7. Kill out the hunger for growth.
8. Yet stand alone and isolated, becausenothing that is imbodied, nothing that is consciousof separation, nothing that is out of theeternal, can aid you. Learn from sensation andobserve it, because only so can you commencethe science of self-knowledge, and plant yourfoot on the first step of the ladder. Grow asthe flower grows, unconsciously, but eagerlyanxious to open its soul to the air. So must youpress forward to open your soul to the eternal.But it must be the eternal that draws forth yourstrength and beauty, not desire of growth. Forin the one case you develop in the lux