79. Is Old Age An Obstacle To Spiritual Advancement?

Can it be that a man fails to find his way to the Light merely because old age prevents him from grasping a new presentation of the Truth, although all his life it has been
his will to do what is right?

There is often a great difference between the will to do right and the will to do good, for what is right in the eyes of the world is not always good.

Today it no longer suffices for a man simply to have the will to do what is right. This might have been enough at his first incarnation. Now more is expected of him. If he does not energetically compel himself to arise, to pull himself together, to seek spiritual knowledge and thus advance spiritually, he is irretrievably lost. Old Age is no obstacle, rather it is a spur, for when a man grows old, it becomes conspicuously evident to him that the hour for him to pass over is approaching. Those who still would hesitate, burden themselves with the sins of sloth- fulness and love of ease, which I have so often pointed out as the very worst enemies of man, sins which will lead him to destruction.

The time for spiritual vagabondage is over, those days are past when men took their ease and comfortably awaited what the future would bring them. It will not be long before a terrible Nemesis will overtake them; a gruesome fate awaits all sluggards and sleepers, even the dullest must then awake.

In studying my Lectures the reader will find that he must summon all his mental powers and concentrate his undivided attention; he must compel his spiritual activity and wakefulness, if he wishes to penetrate into and fully grasp their meaning.

And this is intended. I reject all spiritual sluggards. If a man still possesses a grain of the truth he brought with him from his spiritual home, and he has taken the trouble to read
the Word in full earnestness and impartiality, it will sound as a call in his ears. If he then perceives nothing that re-echoes in his heart, it will hardly be possible to awaken him in the ethereal world, for there he will get nothing else. Such people remain on the spot where they took their stand of their own free will; no one will compel them to leave it, and they will not emerge from the meshes of dense matter in time to escape the disintegration which is everlasting damnation. They will naturally take their refusal to listen over with them from this dense world into the next ethereal world and will continue to be the same there as they were here.

Why indeed should old age be an obstacle? It is a call for Eternity that sounds from the Word. But men will not listen, because they feel more comfortable without it. It is their love of comfort which will finally be their undoing, unless they rouse themselves to life in time. The question put above points very clearly to this love of ease. It is the same with very many; under one more or less acceptable pretext after another, they go on deceiving themselves. These are the husks that will not stand the coming gales, but will be blown away because they are useless in the face of the solemnity of All-Being.

Such men would continue to ask their Maker for more time for consideration. But they would never rise because they do not spiritually rouse themselves. They are the eternally intending who never carry out their intentions themselves. Thus they are lost.