The Seven Qualities and the Eight Powers

::: {.opening} Everything I write rests on one claim: that there is something steady underneath the person you are when things are going badly, and that it can be reached. This page says where that idea comes from, so that nothing in the book is doing quiet work under a name it never gave you.

The practice I follow holds that the original qualities of the soul are

pure · peaceful · loving · joyful
blissful · powerful · knowledgeful

— not achievements, and not a list to work through, but what is there when nothing is in the way. And that the eight powers are what those qualities look like under pressure: :::

::: {.powers}

To withdraw — to step back, become detached, and return.
To pack up — to bring a thing to an end, and let go of thought that is going nowhere.
To accommodate — to make space for the presence, ideas and needs of others.
To discern — to recognise what is true and what is false, and to see clearly.
To judge — to assess choices and act on them wisely, on partial information.
To face — to meet a challenge or a truth and stay with it rather than leave.
To co-operate — to give your time, attention and whatever you know to work with others.
To tolerate — to remain steady without being disturbed by what is happening. :::

::: {.closing} This is not a devotional list that happens to be useful in a crisis. It is a practical inventory that a tradition happened to write down the better part of a century before anyone needed it for this.

Two of these are named differently in different books of mine, and neither is a disagreement about what the power is. The tradition calls the fourth discrimination, in the older sense of telling one thing from another; that word has moved, so these books say discern. And The Inward Singularity calls the third the power to adjust, picturing it as a river going round a boulder rather than as making room for a person. Both are ordinary English for the same thing: taking what is in front of you as it is, and not spending yourself on wishing it were otherwise.

This is Raja Yoga as taught by the Brahma Kumaris, which I have practised for over ten years — as a practitioner, not a teacher. It is a personal interpretation and not an official publication of theirs. Every error in it is mine.

And you do not have to take any of it up. Whether the power to tolerate is an original quality of the soul or a trainable disposition of a nervous system makes no difference to a single argument I have made: either way it is built by occasions, the occasions are disappearing from ordinary life, and it cannot be installed in an emergency. A reader who wants no tradition can take the whole argument and lose nothing. A reader who wants one finds it here, named, at the back — which is where I think it belongs. Available, not insisted on.

With thanks. This book would not exist without the Brahma Kumaris. Their teaching changed how I see the world, and they give it freely, asking nothing in return.

And to the brothers and sisters at my local centre, who taught patiently, answered the same question more than once, and never asked me to hurry. :::