“Let harmlessness . . . be the keynote of your life.” (A Treatise on White Magic, p. 103)

What a concept to be harmless in this day and age! With the increasingly toxic rhetoric and behavior all around us, the idea of being harmless seems quaint and irrelevant. But, harmlessness is a fundamental principle that compels us to consider our life in the context of the greater life. In practicing harmlessness, we search for the root causes of karmic liabilities. Harmlessness conditions our inner and outer life and matures us. How much inner growth we show when we are able to listen to each other, to disagree with each other and still be harmless; have a difference of view, believe in a different way to live our life, and even have a different interpretation of God and still be able to have love, respect, and share time with each other? Can we walk with each other’s God or even gods?

Harmlessness is a fundamental principle that is based on living a life based on greater values. In the Western Civilization the Ten Commandments have been the guiding principles for the rules of private and public behavior and are referred to as the “first principles” in esoteric writings. (See A Treatise on White Magic, pp. 116-121 for discussion on levels of principles.) These are the “Thou shall not…” set of laws that extract obedience and promise immediate action — instant karma — if they are broken. The legal system operated by God, the religious elders, society, or your parents make sure that you are immediately punished and corrected if you break any of these laws. They are relevant and important as they shape our personality life — especially our material/physical life — and enable us to interact with others in a civil society. Once we learn to behave outwardly with respect to these principles, albeit enforced by forces external to us, then we begin to wrestle with the reasons why we follow these principles in a context greater than fear of punishment. Certainly the prophets of old had a reason besides punishment and control?

As we mind the “Thou shall not’s…” then we are able also to consider “Thou shall do’s….” This process leads us to the second level of principles.

The second set of principles deal with what we do proactively. When we strive to live life according to these principles, we start to develop an inner awareness and no outer force needs to discipline us or prod us into obedience. We simply know how to behave, speak, feel, and think. We do what we do, and we do not do certain things, because we know the inner causes and effects of our actions on emotional, mental, and spiritual levels. Being keenly aware of karma and its causes, we start to move deeper into the sources of our behavior and begin to put into place those causes that will result in conditions that are conducive to our health, joy, success, creativity, and continuous spiritual growth and evolution.

The “second principles” are such things as living in beauty, goodness, righteousness, joy, freedom, striving continuously, serving and sacrificing for others. Struggling with the meaning of these huge ideas, putting them into practice at any level, and facing the seemingly incongruent nature of the inner and outer realities, help us eventually to understand how life moves and evolves. We see how an inner understanding may take a lifetime or hundreds of lifetimes to actualize individually or in society at large. Eventually, a higher consciousness comes into focus wherein the immediate reality is always seen in the context of the larger human potential on its many levels.

As we ponder further on the complexity of these principles and their application at any time in the history of humanity, we develop another side, an even deeper and more reflective side. For example, there is no hard and fast rule to what is beauty, or what is goodness; we have to figure it out and see how it applies and why it applies to our life as well as where and when we see its application. We may notice that they have differed in meaning throughout time and culture. What was considered freedom 100 years ago seems so limiting now. What is beautiful in one culture may be considered ugly or gauche in another. We observe and experience and try to find unifying threads in human expressions. Understanding complexity, being comfortable in subtleties, and trying to find unifying threads in the varieties of life makes us grow and mature.

Harmlessness grows out naturally from the first principles and is an integral part of the second set of principles. When we aspire to live in beauty, goodness, and righteousness, we are also learning to live harmlessly. Consider being emotionally harmless where our feelings and moods do not harm others. What about our mental issues — thoughts, opinions, and decisions? Can we unravel our egos and our vanity? Can we put aside our self-centeredness whenever we engage with others? We need to consider being harmless even in our thoughts and mental responses. Can we be harmless even in the practice of our virtues? Every action, feeling, and thought has a certain current and vibrational quality. Whatever we focus on, we create corresponding chemical changes in our bodies. Our vibrational envelope, the aura around us, is thus affected and is conditioned to attract the same qualities to us from external sources. So, consider what “germs and viruses” we are attracting to us if we maintain the mental and emotional toxicity in our life?

In the process of becoming our True Self, the third requirement is to practice harmlessness in action, feeling, and thought. In doing this every day, checking our life at the end of each day, and noting the harm and the harmless ways in which we behaved for the day, we build a line of conscious awareness that will link us eventually to self control, detachment, and true discernment to what is real, what is truthful, what is eternal, and what is really worthwhile. This is the source of healing, joy, and true spiritual growth in us.

A brief YouTube clip of the third step of finding your True Self is attached below. You may also view the clip by linking directly to the YouTube site:

I wish for you today a most joyful day, full of the wonders of a harmless life.

Gita

-The Process of becoming your True Self is a 12-part series of lectures delivered monthly in 2009-2010. You may subscribe to the entire set, or individual lectures. Please link here to more information on the audio CD or download versions, or the DVD version.