The Need For Awareness

IN THIS dissolving world when events are so quickly followed by events, in confusion, with personalities emerging out of the crucible, great and lasting changes are taking place, and you are naturally assailed through your sensitiveness by the insistent alarms and cold fears that people are subject to.  It is a moment when I would like to review your adventure on this journey toward light.

Few seem to grasp the true meaning of religion;  to many it is a hope through formalized prayers and dogmas to achieve a state of comfort and protection. But this is seldom realized, because they leave religion to the teachers.  In your adventure toward freedom you have taken an active part in your own development;  you have sought sincerely and honestly a working method by which you could live as a means for your indwelling Spirit to flow through, for your healing and cleansing and as a way to bring it into the world.

You have become aware that the core of you is an inward calm, that it is steady and not subject to change.  In a sense you have built a levee to guard against the flood of emotion, of terror, and uncertainty;  you are safe.  And by that I mean when tempted to dismay and bewilderment by the steady onslaught of news, you can open an invisible door and melt into the steadfast, quiet and confident center of your being.

Today, the seeming cruelty being inflicted upon the human race drives us to the need for awareness of him to ease our hearts and sustain us, and hard as it is to believe, when you, each in turn, come to your God alone, within, by so much is this devastation diminished;  there is no greater way to practice the love of God, the brotherhood of man, and the fellowship of the Divine world.  Within this center of infinite quiet and peace lies resolution to action that is born of love and wisdom. Whenever challenged by the horrors and irritations of human living you know that through the mind you can touch all that is august, deathless beauty and immortality.

What do we desire above all?  Above all?  Perfect peace of mind, integrity, order, the victory of goodness, honor, joy, and eternal love, free from human sentimentality and emotionalism;  the high, clean impersonal rightness.  Well, all these things are for your asking . . . not praying, for your wanting, accepting, and realizing.

Go your way step by step.  Now is the appointed time to do your part;  and your part, as you know well, cannot be done with righteous and breathless rectitude, but by being receptive— so that you can be used as a means, which is part of being a temple of the Spirit.  It is the antithesis of noise and dubious fame; be the silent ones, anointed, with strength, resolve, and the scallop shell of quiet and the promise of truth.

I have resolved . . . to run when I can, to go when I cannot run, and to creep when I cannot go.  As to the main, I thank him who loves me, I am fixed;  my way is before me, my mind is beyond the River that has no bridge.
—John Bunyan, 1628 — 1688

Restated from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood, 1948

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The hope of a better nation— a better world—
is bound up in the progress and enlightenment of the individual.

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