Finding the Invisible
WE HAVE TALKED about the startle of everyday life, how it is not the reality, but the dream life that you see. For when you are plunged into the sea of sensuous existence, your true life leaves you like smoke. It evaporates into the stuff of dreams; it is hard to hold yourself to yourself.
Your past experiences are past indeed; those strains and emotions of sensuous life are gone, and what has remained is the temple of your own building, that edifice not built by hands. The reality of you is in the invisible; the intangible. In retrospect your spiritual milestones stand stronger to you in their fixed position, than any outward experience.
Having arrived at this understanding try now, quietly, gently, without too much effort of self-discipline, to keep in the invisible; train yourself to keep immaterial. Watching and praying are essential. When hard pressed by old habits and the pressures of time and events, you, as it were, disappear. This is the moment to step back into the invisible, for then the invisible will enfold you and give you great power in the visible world.
Acquire new habits; I cannot tell you how, I can only try to awaken your desire. If your desire is to be in the presence of the Infinite Omniscient Spirit, it must mean that you lay down your sensuous material life that you may find strength and happiness, beauty and knowledge, by being in holy communion with the Spirit within you.
Do not misunderstand me in this; play is good, is necessary, and normal; pleasures are important; the question is— What does your mind feed upon? What is your scale of values? To meet the Spirit within, which is invisible to human life, you must acquire a quality and a technique in dwelling in the invisible while in the visible.
You know— you sense— as does the race, in spite of its trial and error existence, that there are forces far beyond our understanding. As you become stronger in the realization of this immortality within you, the clearer will the way be revealed to you. . . how to keep yourself dissolved and refined in the betraying, impinging, benumbing, outer visible world that you may find yourself strong and serene while living in the flesh.
See your true self as a high mountain, calm and lofty, still and eternal. The daily task— the mean, the malicious, the challenging, the seeming meaninglessness of this little measured existence— see through them all while you are in them, to the lofty pinnacle of your inner self. Nothing here has scale; it is limitless, infinite, transcendent.
Now that you know, now that you begin to realize your godhood, your Divine eternal gift, take the measures necessary to keep invisible in a visible world, immortal in a mortal world; eternal in a changing world; continually reborn in a dying world.
Restated from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood • 1948
• • •
The hope of a better nation— a better world—
is bound up in the progress and enlightenment of the individual.
• • •
