The Higher Patience
Patience is
the undisturbed attitude of mind characterized by steadiness and quietness in
the face of anything that comes to pass; that has passed or is expected to pass.
It is stillness of mind in the midst of the ceaseless change and motion of life.
As the mind is dual in its nature and application, patience is also twofold. It
can be forced by desire or spontaneous by practice and knowledge. It can be
personal or impersonal, higher or lower, and motivated by the desire for reward
or applied as a “bond maiden to devotion.” When considering patience in the
light of the great evolutionary journey of the Soul and its divine purpose to
gain a truer realization of the Self and raise every degree of substance and
intelligence to a higher state, cultivation of the higher patience based on
spiritual knowledge would seem to be a prerequisite for all those aspiring to be
the better able to help and teach others. Time is a necessary element in all
this. The Theosophical literature is full of references to the characteristics
of higher patience, obstacles, and how it may be developed.
The higher patience is manifested in one who “fears no failure and courts
no success,” who takes “as much as merit hath in store,” who is not ruffled, who
fulfills individual duty and allows others to do as they please, who is
considerate and refrains from judgment of others, and who is not cast down by
the apparent imperfections observed in oneself or others. The higher patience is
a moral attitude of mind and an ethical practice of devotion, accompanied by
good judgment in action and clear discrimination of truth.
The chief obstacles to the acquirement of the higher patience are the ideas
we hold in the mind and the desires we encourage in our heart. For example, it
is said that we should be patient as one who forever more endures. Clearly, the
idea and conviction that man is only a thinking animal who was born and will
surely die is an obstacle for the materialist. The idea and belief that man was
created with a new soul and may lose that soul is similarly an obstacle for the
development of higher patience. What needs to be proven and realized is that man
is a Soul whose spiritual essence is immortal because one with and inseparable
from Deity. As a soul, the real enduring Man was, is and always will be evolving
in knowledge, power and purity in one temporary human body or another. The other
obstacle is the desire for reward manifesting in many obvious and subtle ways.
It may manifest in the desire for spiritual knowledge and power, or the
fulfillment of our aspirations for fame, wealth, comfort and possessions.
Ignorance, indifference, laziness and carelessness can also nurture a desire
that is easily frustrated and bound to produce impatience and irritability.
There is, of course, a higher carelessness, the practice of which leads to
higher patience. It is also called resignation or the inner renunciation. The
basis of this practice is regard for and confidence in the law of karma. It is
a mental realization that all causes will manifest as effects in their proper
time under law and that whatever is experienced now is an effect of a previous
cause and is right. It is a devotional practice of performing all duties to self
and others, with the best skill and knowledge we have, renouncing all personal
interest in reward for the results of action. The perfection of
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this practice is the work of a lifetime, if not many lifetimes, and requires
patience. Fortunately, even a little of this practice is not lost and delivers
one from great risk.
QUOTES ON PATIENCE
Have patience, Candidate, as one who fears no failure, courts no success.
The Voice of The Silence
A selection from William Q. Judge
Try to acquire patient Resignation.... The first step in becoming is
Resignation. Resignation is the sure, true, and royal road.
Try to make it a part of your inner mind that it is no use to worry; that things
will be all right, no matter what comes, and that you are resolved to do what
you see before you, and trust to Karma for all the rest.
Try for patience in all the very smallest things of life every day, and you will
find it growing very soon, and with it will come greater strength and influence
on and for others, as well as greater and clearer help from the inner side of
things.
All questions are vital so long as they remain unsolved but all will be
answered. It requires patience in ourselves, for many times the answers do not
come until years after the question has been propounded.
Be patient, kindly and wise, for perhaps in the next moment of life, the light
will shine out upon thy companion, and you discover that you are but a blind
man, claiming to see.
If you are striving for light and Initiation, remember this, that your cares
will increase, your trials thicken, your family make new demands upon you. He
who can understand and pass through these patiently, wisely, placidly -- may
hope.
Rely within yourself on your Higher Self always, and that gives strength, as the
Self uses whom it will. Persevere, and little by little new ideals and
thought-forms will drive out of you the old ones. This is the eternal process.
Our patience will achieve more than our force.
- Edmund Burke
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient
attention, than to any other talent.
- Isaac Newton
Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For
if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt
you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great
wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not
lose courage in considering you own imperfections but instantly set about
remedying them - every day begin the task anew.
- Saint Francis de Sales
How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by
degrees.
- William Shakespeare
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for
instance.
- Franklin P. Jones
Genius is eternal patience.
- Michaelangelo
To know how to wait is the great secret of success.
- Joseph Marie de Maistre
“Theosophical Independence” is produced monthly by Associates of The
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