Daily Theosophy

The next morning he was dismissed from the monastery, and from now on he had to take care of himself, and either live as a total recluse or choose for a worldly life, finding a spouse and founding a family. He choose the first. The authorities came to the monastery, but he had already left – nobody knew where he had gone. The monks defended him, but that the authorities wouldn’t belief, even though monks in those days never lied.

(38)

(Why?)

Deedee managed to deceive another man, who married her. But after two years he divorced and fled in horror. He left the country, and nobody saw him again. It had been impossible for him to be constantly ridiculed by her, and used as her slave – while she had been so absolutely lovely in the beginning. She gave birth to a beautiful daughter. The baby was taken to Deedee’s parents, and, after her marriage, adopted by the elder daughter and her husband – who got two daughters and a son themselves.

An old pharmacist who ran a small drugstore in town was getting too old, and as destiny had it, Deedee (who from now on called herself Diana again) became the proprietor of that small shabby shop. She knew enough of herbs and medicine to run that shop, and give some medical advices. She could talk very nice, and was fond of gossip, and that is were most people came for. She herself was good in making up stories to shine an evil light on other people, and had something for everyone. People of coarse noticed after sometime that the stories did not cover the truth, but she was also a patient listener, so that many could ventilate their own gossips in the shop. Other people disliked her so much, and hated the smell and the ‘vibration’ of the shop, that they would walk on the other side of the street, or preferably avoided that street at all. But they had to walk 45 minutes to get their medicine from another shop.

Among the people flocking around her were some professional criminals. She would sell them concentrated poisons or ready-made mixtures. She was also popular with people who wanted to organize ostentatious parties. She was never caught for that – partly because the authorities feared for their own life if she would come to know about them. She herself poisoned but few people, because she rather left that job to others. Once she tried to poison the lady who had taken care of her as a ‘child with educational problems’ – because she still cherished her hatred towards her. She failed, because due to some irregularity, the lady didn’t drink her regular cup of afternoon tea. It got cold, and the poison disappeared with the tea in the sewer. The lady never knew it. Diana never got a second chance.

When she was about 45 she became ill, but continued to work in the shop for as long as it went. She suffered terrible pains, and her suffering increased day by day. It was, of course, the result the evil causes of her mind of this and former lives, now reflecting themselves in her physical body, in other words it was a way in which her karma sought equilibrium. She lived only up to 48, after a period of tremendous pain, and angriness against the pain – what made it only worse. The last year her skin was full of blisters, and her eyes burnt. Her body was buried without ceremony. Nobody wanted to attend it. The only one who came was the monk. He had forgiven her almost immediately, but had never forgotten her, and had dedicated many a prayer or mantra to the enlightenment of her soul. No doubt the lady would have come to the burial, but she had peacefully passed away at the age of 87, two years before.

Now why do I tell you such a long story about such a strange woman? Because she plays an important role in the future in this book. But if we want to know how it all started, we have to go back thousands of years.

Destiny had it that a twin girl was born in a certain family. They both grew up to be nice girls, just average girls, nothing special. But after some years it appeared that always if the first wanted to do something good, the second one wanted to oppose it, or hinder it. But if we want to understand this Destiny, we have to go back ages.

Again many thousands of years before the birth of the twin, one of them had been living as a girl and woman named Beauty – or whatever her name was in the language of that country at that time. Even this girl called Beauty had a very long history of incarnations both as men and as women behind her. But those lives are not part of this story. In this life, Beauty started, for the first time, to become mentally aware of the difference between good and evil. Before that time, in still earlier lives, she had just followed her impulses of what she liked and never thought about whether it was good or not. But then, one time she became aware that it makes a difference whether you do something ‘good’ or something ‘bad.’ And she understood that you should do what is good and not do what is bad. So she started doing only those things which she conceived of as good, or of which people had been telling her that were good. She didn’t want to pay attention to what was bad, and therefore, if it came to her mind, she pushed it away. Sometimes it came back and she pushed it away again. She always avoided and never faced what was bad, even if it came from her own mind and feelings. The result was that she became more and more skilled in doing good things, even though she did not understand why they were good. She understood that if you would do something bad, others would become angry, and that she didn’t like. So during her life she became better and better. This process went on for several subsequent lifetimes, over a period of many hundreds of years. But all the time ‘evil’ also presented itself to her mind, and she also saw in what other people were doing. She kept pushing it away. She did, in those far millennia in the past, not have the intelligence to understand that good and bad or evil always go together, like two sides of a coin, or as a shadow when there is light shining on something. So the other side of things kept presenting themselves to her, like her shadow was always following her. Because she never took a look at the evil, she never saw that what she called bad had also something good, and that what was good also had something bad, a disadvantage of some sort. She just discarded everything she found evil on first side and tried to deny its existence. The result was that instead of diminishing, the evil side of things became ever stronger. For example, she would not give any attention to people she regarded as bad; she would not talk to them, she would not ask them why they did what they did, what their real intention or motivation was. She just despised them – and they felt that. Thus she avoided to recognize the oneness and unity of everything in the universe. For her there were two universes: the good one, of which she was a part, and an evil one, which she wanted to ignore. The evil side of things was no part of her compassion. She did not care for bad people or their ugly expressions. This went on for such a long time that the suppressed or pushed-away thoughts had to confront her, lest she should learn to understand non-duality, i.e. the inherent oneness of the universe, and everything in the universe. In fact, by doing good she failed to evoke the good in the so-called bad – or perhaps just desperate – people. She gave them no chance. On the other side she overlooked the bad tendencies in the good she supported. And that is why, one day, the twin was born of which she was a part. She could not avoid or deny her twin sister. She found her twin sister quite boring, because every time when she was doing what she thought good, her twin sister opposed her. She always pointed out that what she thought was good, was not actually so good as she thought, and on the other hand, she made it a habit to play the bad girl, unconsciously hoping that her good sister, Beauty would recognize the good intentions in her bad behavior. However Beauty was so obsessed by doing good, that she started to hate her twin sister. And the twin sister, called Diana, became more and more rigid and stiff when she saw her repeated efforts fail. Step by step the ‘evil’ that she only had played, became her actual character. She became more and more identified with opposing Beauty’s good thoughts. So in this way the one sister became ever better, the other one became ever worse. Finally Diana decided that she would go to the bottom of evil to confront her sister, until she would wake up to the craziness of her dualistic thinking. These opposing emotions caused an ever stronger relation and bond between the two sisters, though it was not a very pleasant relation. The problem could not be solved in that life. Time after time again they were born in some relation, as relatives or work relations or met each other in confronting situations. They did not remember each other in the subsequent life, but still there seemed to be a recognition. More and more Beauty felt love for Diana. But Diana would never give up until she had reached her goal: which was either Beauty’s destruction or Beauty’s awakening. In the life I just described Dura Diana was the bad girl, heavily loaded by the karma of inflicting evil, and Beauty was the lady, who had tried to help Diana, and despite her failure to do so and the adverse effect, always kept some place in her heart, and some hope for Dura Diana. And here the story of these two ends for the time being. Let’s first pay attention to some other dreams.

(39)

(Shano)

Shano

Shano was eight and at school and was quite good. Not very good, but he was the best of his year.