Superior Index Go to the next: Chapter 22
Print Files: A4 Size.
Be still, O my soul, and know that I AM God!1
One of the most difficult things for any man to do is to become still. The very excitement of life, the activity in the world of form, like the billows of the sea, threatens to engulf the frail bark of man's identity. When man hotly pursues the Divine, he is not utterly free to storm the bastions of heaven by the fervor of constant and devoted meditation. No indeed; for with each outreach toward God, the lingering voices of the astral realm, the desires of the flesh, the failings and fears, and the old records, like gray ghosts of fallen effort, return to plague the mind and to test the devotion of the chela.
The soul that is enthralled by the love of Christ must guard against invoking his love out of the desire to experience its pleasure rather than for the multi-faceted uses to which that love can be put as Cosmic Christ action in the world of form. In the divine romance, the Beloved must be seen and known as the reality of the self, and love itself must be regarded as the means of transmitting the identity of the Beloved into all-enfolding action in the formless as well as in the form world. This is the purpose of the divine romance, and the imitation of Christ is the highest love to which the chela can aspire.
Too often in meditation the feeling of bliss, joy, or adoration for God becomes a trap to the aspirant which catches him up in the glamour of the divine romance. Unless he first calls forth the proper protection, this state of divine ecstasy can leave him wide open to the assault of negative forces who would like nothing better than to cause him to plummet from his lofty adventure into a certain morbid despair. The soul who beholds the wonder of God as the wonder of his True Self and finds his pleasure in enthroning the qualities of God within the chalice of his character is the truly great divine lover.
When El Morya asked us, beloved Jesus and me, to discourse on these subjects, we made our entreaty to Pallas Athena, the Goddess of Truth, and we urged all of the forces of light to work within our own consciousness so as to draw the most vivid images and transmit them to the students with a view toward greater progress for all.
Meditation is not intended to be entertainment, albeit we admit it can be; but the chela must be prepared to engage in the constancy of right meditation even when feelings of bliss are not present and when the enclosing forces of negativity seek to oppress the aspirant to divine contact.
Let darkness surround! The dawn is coming! The dawn exists. The dawn is within. Let fear assault! Love is greater. Love is compassion, even for the seeker. Love seeks to convey itself into the nether regions of man's darkness. The Christ - the Christos - the Greater Light must burst the bonds of shadowed substance, of wrong thought and feeling. The golden lotus cup of the Buddha is raised toward the haven of universal comfort.
God watches the seeker; he answers each call. He places himself within the chalice of the seeker's consciousness. God is available. Through meditation upon him there is a raising-up of the eye of the soul to behold God. The Knower, the Perceiver, becomes the known; for the fingers of the Divine reach out and touch in the darkness the upraised hands of the seeker.
The communion of higher meditation can be a lightninglike experience wherein the fohatic powers of Infinite Love enfold and enslave the lover of the Divine until he can no longer extricate himself from his universal destiny. But he has placed himself in this position; he has held his faith that the purposes of God are benign, that the greatest purpose of God is the conveyance of universal reality to the self, and that this must of necessity involve total surrender. For if man would receive all that is real, he must give up all that is unreal.
Serenity cannot manifest so long as the individual is surrounded by fear or vacillation. Only as man outpictures the attributes of the Divine does the immutable law express through him. The tangibility of God is the tangibility of his manifestation within. What phenomenon can exceed the manifestation of the universal Lord of life and death, as he appears within the seeking son?
No mission is greater than the mission of unity with God. Contemplation and meditation set forth these goals before the mind and heart of the contemplator. He who loves God is beloved of God. The human sea is like a mist of darkness; and the falling arc of descendant reality, the mighty light that shines in the darkness of men, touches the droplets of individuality that rise into the atmosphere. Moment by moment their opacity is reduced, their translucency is transmitted into transparency; and the whole is rendered a miraculous crystalline sphere of reflected light merging with the impenetrable light that is within the heart of every atom - of every sun - of every child whom God hath made.
Prayer is invocative; meditation is convocative. The Word goes forth; and the Word is the burning power of the Spirit that abides in the flesh but consumes it not, that transforms it, that raises the whole man, with his passion for reality, vibrationally, emotionally, mentally, etherically, and spiritually. For the entire being of man must be touched by the power of truth, and truth is the nature of God. The seeker for truth will find it within as he contacts the mind of God in nature, in himself, and in the disciples of all ages who have merged their consciousness into meditation upon the One.
That there is no higher religion than truth must be proven by every man through the science of meditation. You cannot fellowship with darkness and find light. Scientific meditation includes the drawing-apart from worldly fellowship, from old communions of coarseness, and the setting-aside of daily periods when man, facing the dawn of his own Spiritual Self, can watch the rising sun of perfection appearing in the sky of his own consciousness. When it comes to the zenith, it performs its perfect work of flooding the whole sphere of identity with the universal light.
We are made aware again and again of how individuals, in their search for God, ponder weighty intellectual tomes as though conveyance could thus be made of the Universal Mind. The Universal Mind, beloved ones, is just as strong in man when it remains undefined as it is when it takes a relatively definitive expression (for all form expressions of the Deity must be relative to the Whole).
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to bring glad tidings of good things to all people."2
Let men understand that the universality of God wipes away the tears of separation that prevent men from seeing their place in the universal scheme. You must meditate in order to bring to God the fruits of your own unique experience. You must convey to him your joys and your sorrows. Because his nature is sublime, he will wipe away all tears from your eyes, all blindness from the heart, and crown you with the radiance of the Christed One, of the victorious Buddha, the unfolding spiritual flower.