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To the Spiritual Mendicants Who Minister to the Needs of the World:
"It does not matter!" When you can say that to the unavoidable circumstance, when you can commit the keeping of yourself unto Him without reserve, when you feel no qualms of anguish because you have sought and held to the best of your ability to the highest link with Self right while understanding the need to surrender even the sense of self-righteousness, you are truly beginning to come out of the bondage of Egypt. For Egypt symbolizes the material creation - the pyramid of Matter standing by the ever flowing Nile of time, winding through the sand of space.
When the fiery world of Spirit that gloriously possessed the consciousness and means whereby it could produce material form, primal substance, and the ability to produce secondary creation is revealed more fully to embodied men and women, they are able to grasp the real meaning of life. They see the schoolrooms of earth, the geometric corners of creation, the endless circles of repetitious activities, the noble aspirations of triadic manifestation, and they recognize their inner need to obtain congruency with reality. But when they understand that the tensions of spiritual determination are necessary reinforcements in the battle of overcoming the transitory, they are on the road to victory. Yet we must map out the campaign long before we are able to execute it.
One of the saddest facts of human existence is that some individuals, by reason of their own self-importance and materialistic insensibilities, reject the necessary instructions that would have given them their freedom not only in some ultimate time but also here and now. Instead they allow themselves to remain tethered to fetters whose clutching bondage has continuously caused their own joys to be spilled out of the cup of life. But heaven itself is both objective and pragmatic. Therefore, the cry has gone forth that many who are first shall be last and that the last may well be first.1
Let men, then, see to it that they lose not the crown of their rejoicing.2 Temporal life is without bond or guarantee and can be terminated at any time. The business of acquiring spiritual fortitude and spiritual reality is the only business in which the soul ought to be engaged. Countless individuals, without realizing that they are doing so, spurn genuine activities of the Spirit that would enable their souls to grow fat; they have chosen instead to revel in the entertainment marts of the world or in psychic involvement in the curious.
There are enough rewards in true spirituality to warrant men placing their attention upon the higher teachings, and I am certain you know that all is not gold that glitters in the field of so-called esoteric studies. But pray you must if you would be free that you might recognize the potential in yourself as well as in others to create pinions of freedom to which you can attach your consciousness and then move aloft, above the hopeless sea of mortal drivel.
The way of the Christ is the way of life. It is the way of beauty. It is the way of hope. The ascended masters are not dead. God is not dead. Hope is not dead. And even in the darkest hour, the planet is not dead so long as the freedom to produce the vibration of virtue and aspiration lives within the soul.
I think that the freedoms of speech, of religion, of the press, and of assembly are necessary in order that God and man might have the opportunity to communicate the living Christ to the world. In order to break the bread of the knowledge of the True Self to humanity, man must be able to disseminate that knowledge. Where it is forbidden by law or harassed by those who think they do God's service when they interfere with the flow of the highest truth, millions are deprived of their rightful inheritance. For this reason, the great Masters of Wisdom have sought to incorporate into the American dream a dream of freedom that can be patterned by all nations. All nations can and should make it their own, for the people of the world hunger for personal freedom as well as for spiritual freedom.
Men have no more loyal or devoted friends anywhere than among the ascended masters. Yet we also acknowledge our friendship with a host of patriots who live yet in the veil of flesh as servants of God and friends of all mankind. These will not permit themselves to be blown by the wind as chaff.3 They insist on the dignity of their worth, of their service, of their lives, and of the pursuits which God has made for all to enjoy. These see the vehicle of the little self as expendable, even as they know that their greatest strength emanates from their dedication to spiritual goals.
Matter and substance change. The individual's consciousness is altered by circumstance, by education, by family, by the economic level to which it is accustomed, by his intelligence quotient, and through associations with other people. Consider, then, the meaning of choosing one's friends carefully. If your friends are turning you against God, if their thoughts are destroying your peace of mind, if their activities are a constant war against your spirit, regardless of how close they may be to you, you should begin in the name of Almighty God to ask yourself this question: Should they remain a permanent part of my life, or should they be expurgated to make room for higher friendships?
Only you can determine what course to take. But it would be well to remember what the Christ said long ago, "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."4 If the Christ sought to save men's lives, why would he ask them to deny their lives or those of their families before him? The question simply becomes, What is real and what is unreal? The Christ image of every man which was bestowed upon him by God is real. The self that must be denied is unreal. The unreal seeks to cramp the style of the real, to hold it in bondage. And so Ishmael, the son of Hagar, the bondwoman, is not to be compared with the Son of promise.5
The altar of being in the form world is a place of great threshing. It is the threshing floor of the Most High. The flailing of the grain is the chastening of God that refines the pure gold of the soul and brings it to the surface where it can be gathered into the treasure-house of reality.
Many who read about reality fail to realize their responsibility to make the best use of the opportunities which life extends. Surrender to God is not death. It is life. It is beauty. It is hope. It is the wings of the mind borne upward into the airiness and lightness of celestial realities. No empty void is there, but the natives of cosmos in all of their blazing reality - ministering spirits, angels, cosmic beings, cosmic masters - one and all, as the higher kin of every man, hold their offerings of eternal sweetness for the purification and release of the souls of men from bondage.
What a wonderful schoolhouse the planet Earth is! How joyously men can chuckle, even when dark shadows cross their paths with the opacity of their crusty nonsense. Men must learn to shatter bondage, to regard it as an enemy, to see the clutching of the little self as a frightening thing for in one moment it could cause them to drown in a sea of earthly perdition. On the other hand, the lifeline to the Higher Self is already flung out, and the eternal Presence waits as the eternal Father to draw the prodigal son6 of the little self into the mooring of his eternal greatness.
Whether one has attained his victory yesterday or today, when it comes it is the long-awaited product of eternal evolution and, in a very real sense, it is a spiritual rebirth. The words "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God"7 signify that man is not only of the earth earthy, but he is also a product of heavenly aspiration.8
God hopes for the soul. Man must identify with the hopes of God. And then as the tolling of a great bell, the death knell of the finite self will make no mournful sound but it will sing to the soul in cadences of immortality. Through these cadences man shall come to understand the golden meaning of reality, and the revelation of worlds unknown shall also be his own. Stretching as an endless column of beautiful trees, the landmarks of the real point the way from present circumstances to the very footstool of reality, the rainbow of ascendancy, the Spirit Most Holy where man is crowned with the life that is God.
I, who was Francis of old who loved earth, sea, and sky, remain your brother who hopes for the best in you all.
- May I sign myself as of old, simply