August 1933

BROTHER OF MINE:

I have refrained from writing my personal instructions to you earlier than this as I felt your need to think things through, and your strong inner urge to be left free to work out the concept of this group work in your own way. Group work in connection with the spiritual life is not, for you, easy. Your life training as an artist in your own field has taught you to work on the physical plane in group formation. It is in the field of esoteric endeavor that you find in yourself an antagonistic reaction. There is in you, and rightly so, a determination to be yourself and to stand alone and on your own feet. This determination of yours is sound. It has met a most needed demand of your own soul. It has been necessary for your personality to be forced by your soul to go the lonely and isolated way.

But it is this very quality of yours that I desire to weld into this group; it can be offered by you in service to the group. It is in this participation in a subjective group endeavor - loosely organized on the physical plane and intended to remain an inner group condition - which will give you opportunity to express for others the gain of your life experience. Therefore I would ask you to remember, my brother, that one of the contributions that you can make to this group of fellow aspirants is the attitude you hold to organized forms. Another is your power of intuitive perception and your capacity to sense reality. I call your attention to this. I am taking earnest students into my group, not with the sole intent of giving them esoteric training, but also for what they can bring to each other in the perfecting process. This group in my Ashram is composed of human beings who are oriented towards the light, who [279] have made progress on the Way, and yet who still have individual limitations, character defects and over-accentuated personality traits. There is a tendency to find one's peace and relaxation in a well-intended spiritual withdrawing and isolation; this is ever a limitation of the mystic temperament. Is it not so?

In any group which has for its objective the development of the intuition, there must appear the concretizing faculty of the mind. This the intuition must both offset and at the same time use. The mind emphasizes form and the building of forms. The intuition is formless, and yet the ideas intuited must express themselves through form. From this concretizing faculty, owing to your sense of beauty and your sense of the essential values, you are singularly free. For you there must be the lesson of the equal divinity of form and of form building, with the creative work of organized detail in every balanced production. Beauty is, after all, as much of divinity as can be expressed through any one form. Remember that form and life are one. There is naught but life in manifestation.

Your power to intuit, therefore, will aid the group, so regard your work as a service to be definitely rendered.

Emotional stress and strain and your intense love of beauty have been the principal training elements in your life. Oft you have been bewildered and your fellowmen bewilder you at times. Seek for one year to bring to bear upon them and upon yourself the light of the intellect, and let the power of a spiritually applied analysis and the consecrated functioning of the concrete mind be deliberately applied. Remain ever the Observer, using the concrete mind as a divinely organized instrument.

Work with symbols will be found of real value to you if you persevere. I would give you a hint anent them which your intuition will reveal. Where the converging lines of any symbol meet and where the many lines cross there is a point of force and of illumination, a focused center through which the illumined mind can pierce. Ponder on this.

Will you for six months, my brother, attempt the following meditation, remembering that I but suggest and seek not to control or to dictate?... [280]