Golden Words for the Day

Character Building is a manifestation of your spiritual development. Character is the manifestation of the degree of Soul Contact. When you are out of Balance, the connection between you and your Higher Soul becomes minimal. Weak Character reflects the weakness of the Soul.

-GMCKS

Effect of Intoxicating Liquors

(Extract form “Hidden Side of Things” by C.W. Leadbeater)

The man who is eagerly seeking for excuses for the gratification of ignoble cravings frequently asserts that food and drink, belonging as they do purely to the physical world, can have but little effect upon a man's inner development. This statement is obviously not in accordance with common sense, for the physical matter in man is in exceedingly close touch with the astral and mental-- so much so, that each is to a great extent a counterpart of the other, and coarseness and grossness in the physical body imply a similar condition in the higher vehicles.

Thus a man who is building for himself a gross and impure physical body is building for himself at the same time coarse and unclean astral and mental bodies as well. This effect is visible at once to the eye of the trained clairvoyant, and he will readily distinguish between a man who feeds his physical vehicle with pure food and another who contaminates it by intoxicating drink or decaying flesh.

There can be no question that it is the duty of every man to develop all his vehicles as far as possible in order to make them perfect instruments for the use of the soul, which in itself is being trained to be a fit instrument in the hands of the Solar Deity, and a perfect channel for the divine love. The first step towards this is that the man himself should learn thoroughly to control the lower bodies, so that there shall be in them no thought or feeling except those he approves.

All these vehicles, therefore, must be in the highest possible condition of efficiency; they must be pure and clean and free from taint; and it is obvious that this can never be, so long as the man puts into the physical body undesirable constituents. Indulgence in alcohol or carnivorous diet is absolutely fatal to anything like real development, and those who adopt these habits are putting serious and utterly unnecessary difficulties in their own way.

If, through introducing impure particles into his physical body, the man builds himself an unseemly and unclean astral body, we must not forget that it is in this degraded vehicle that he will have to spend the first part of his life after death. Just as, here in the physical world, his coarseness draws into association with him all sorts of undesirable entities who, like parasites, make his vehicles their home, and find a ready response within him to their lower passions, so also will he suffer acutely from similar companionship after death, and from the working out in astral life of the conditions which he has here set in motion.