The Road to Initiation
The article: On My Cosmic Analyses
Chapter 11
Sympathies and antipathies
What is it then that causes this obstructive imbalance?
As mentioned above, it is caused by exaggerated attraction and repulsion.
But what is then attraction and repulsion in this connection?
Well, here it is, as in all the other vicissitudes of life, of an
"electric" nature.
Since attraction and repulsion are the same as the feeling of sympathy or antipathy towards something or other in the individual's surroundings or daily life, then these realities will actually thus be identical with a kind of higher form of real
"magnetic" function between the
"self" and the object of the sympathy or antipathy.
This
"magnetic" function, or attraction and repulsion, is, like everything else in existence, subject to particular laws.
If it deviates from these laws, it will at once cause a corresponding disharmony, which expresses itself in the mind or consciousness of the individual concerned as imbalance.
This imbalance is known in daily life as "being in love", as "avarice", "thirst for power", "vanity" and the like, all of these realities being expressive of too great a desire or too great a sympathy towards the object concerned.
This in turn means that manifesting the individual's excessively strong sympathy has involved an expenditure of energy or power that is greater than Nature intended.
The individual must then lack this surplus of power in other fields and cannot therefore manifest the magnetic attraction that Nature intended in these fields.
In these fields the individual's sympathy is therefore correspondingly weak or insufficient.
This lack of higher power or energy can at times be so pronounced that the individual fails completely and is quite without sympathy in those fields.
But where there is no sympathy, there can be only antipathy.
And this antipathy manifests itself through the consciousness of the individual as
hatred, hot-temperedness, intolerance, the desire to slander and so on.