"The quality of perseverence is another gift which has been made to Mankind. The Human Race has had a great task to accomplish in lifting Itself from a very elementary level, in a spiritual sense, to a higher level of evolution. If Man had not had a persevering nature, no gains could have been accomplished, because the forces opposing such gains would have been too great to overcome. Mankind does not realize the odds against which the fight has had to be waged."
"One of the greatest obstacles to progress, in the spiritual sense, has been the very body which has been used as the vehicle of experience within the three-dimensional plane of learning. The body has had much in common genetically with the animal life-forms on this planet, and, for this reason, much in the way of instinctive aggression is taken on with each new birth into physical life. These natural instincts of a baser nature have, again and again, confounded the attempts of even the most evolved souls to reach perfection on The Physical Plane."
"Another great obstacle to achieving the goal set for Mankind has been the severity of physical existence itself. A requirement to work hard for the necessities of life, the intemperateness of the climate in many areas of The Earth, the near-barrenness of large parts of the land, and the constant presence of disease and affliction, have combined to block the way to easy success."
"Yet another difficulty has been the necessity that each man have no recollection at the conscious level of the previous lives he has lived or of the basic pattern and goal of the soul's pilgrimage. This has allowed doubt, atheism, and skeptism to sidetrack the energies into endeavors unworthy of a dedicated soul."
"Lastly, man has had to wage his struggle in the very midst of Forces of a negative and retrograde kind Whose declared aim is to drag as many souls as possible down to their destruction. These Dark Forces are largely entities and beings who have themselves become lost to 'salvation' and who know that, in the final phases of the earth's experience on The Physical Plane, they will be utterly destroyed. There is thus nothing that can dissuade them from their endeavor to turn man aside from The True Path."
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