“One of the greatest difficulties, when we attempt to understand our personal destiny, lies in the rigidity of our thinking. We have grown accustomed to judging a particular event in our habitual way; and it is in our nature that such habitual judgments often have a negative colour. Nothing is to be won from them directly; they need to be transmuted. What is in the background when a human being holds rigidly to his circumscribed thinking? Generally it is because he has a motive whose character he does not fully acknowledge or understand.
Wherever we are rigid in thought, we are liable to cruelty, however little intended; and the way to transmutation of thought is through a fire of sacrifice, which prepares us to accept radically different conceptions of the world, whatever their consequences for ourselves may be. In personal life we can test our judgments for their gold content; whether they are positive, whether they are selfless, whether they have the quality that really comes to meet the person or the thing with which they are concerned. If they fail to pass these tests, then they are to re-enter the fire of purification.”
Human Needs and Cosmic Answers
Adam Bittleston