Discrimination

Discrimination is an essential part of your approach to the Teaching. In choosing reading material for example, you may wonder how you can know whether or not a book contains a fantastic Teaching without reading it. The answer is that when you have a sense of discrimination, you "smell" it before you read it. A dog smells a piece of meat to find out whether or not it is rotten and will not eat it if it is. If he ate the meat without smelling it first, he would poison himself and it would be too late for him to find out that it was spoiled. Similarly, by reading a "rotten" book, you have already polluted your consciousness. A sense of discrimination saves you from reading the book.

If your sense of discrimination is not very active, read a sentence or a paragraph and then toss the material away if your intuition tells you not to read it at all. You must develop the sense of discrimination or intuition. Do you drink a cup of liquid to find out what it is? First you smell it. Then you may dip your finger in the cup and taste just a little. Or you may send it off for analysis, and so on. Before you read a book, you must know who the author is and what kind of life he has lived, what his philosophy is, what religion he practices, and what are his goals in life. All of this information can tell you whether or not to read his book.

A person once brought me a book with a fantastic cover. I knew the author was a man who used various drugs and encouraged others to do the same, so I said, "I don't like to read books written by this author." The person replied, "Well, you are a prejudiced and narrow-minded fanatic." I told him, "Even with such accusations, you cannot make read that book." Years later the person became a drug user. When he finally saw his own destruction, he searched for help from various organizations. Eventually, after losing his job and his wife, he came to me and said, "You know, it was that book which ruined my life." "You are a fanatic," I said to him, reminding him of what he had said to me in the past. "Well, he said, "I withdraw my accusations; you were right." But he realized this only after a great tragedy.

Discrimination saves your life. Try to develop the sense of discrimination by all possible means. Purify your nature, and your sense of discrimination will grow and unfold.

Beware of those who advise the use of drugs in conjunction with the Teaching and meditation.

Beware of those who think that life is a joke, a purposeless drama or comedy.

Beware of those who are "prophets," "sages," or the "incarnations of Great Ones."

Beware of those who use you for their own separative policies and who manipulate you and use your resources to climb to higher positions.

Beware of those who praise you, flatter you, or bribe you. They will lead you into an undisciplined life.

The Ageless Wisdom never encourages showing off. It encourages humility, simplicity, and inner work - inner transformation.

-Torkom Saraydarian

The Ageless Wisdom, p.31,32