January 1940

You and I, my brother, have worked together for long years - longer perhaps than you know. There is little that I can say to you along the line of revealing to you the glamors which hold your personality in thrall. These you well know. Often I have told you what they are. In your case, it is not so much a particular glamor but the presence of several smaller ones. The more sensitive a person is the more responsive he is to others.

You have wisdom, beauty of purpose, devotion and sincerity - all characteristics of the advanced disciple. The glamor which holds you is inherited from other lives. You have immersed yourself in no new glamor in this life, and this is rare indeed and for this I commend you.

But certain ancient glamors - racial and personal - still hold you, and it is the overcoming of these that constitutes your life problem and your present failure to do so that keeps you where you are. If perhaps I define or indicate to you two glamors which intrude into your soul expression and prevent the entrance of the full light of the soul, and if I give to them names which are not usual you may, perhaps - by due pondering - arrive at the point where you will be able to dissipate them.

The glamor of "the flight into safety of the racial [600] consciousness" is one of your dominant glamors, even if - in your own consciousness - you repudiate it. Every individual, without exception, is subject to this racial glamor and its potency is unbelievable. The subjective life of any nation, producing as it does racial psychology, national inclinations and traits and characteristics, lies behind every single individual and into it he can at any time throw himself, and into it he can retreat thus taking refuge in the past and emphasizing certain racial attitudes. The overcoming of inherited traits and attitudes is, in your case, essential. You are really cosmopolitan. But in your life demonstration no one would know it. Disciples need to remember that it may only be in this life that they have been born into any particular race or nation and this only from the personality angle. Being however, thus temporarily affiliated they may - if sensitive - become so identified with racial problems and relationships, with racial history and qualities that this ancient inheritance (which is racial and not personal and therefore not theirs) overwhelms them and constitutes a major conflict. So it is with you. In every race and nation there are those who - down the ages - have again and again incarnated in certain races and groups. There are also those who have incarnated in a particular race in order to acquire either certain valuable qualities with which a race or nation can endow a man, or to use that racial and national experience as a means whereby there can be the breaking of such bonds, a consequent release and a subsequent entering into the freedom of humanity itself. Ponder on this, my brother, and be not separate in your sensitivity and set as to your personality origins, to your so-called racial loyalties and characteristics, acquired through environing circumstance.

Is this too hard a lesson and a task, my brother? If so, determine within yourself if it is so or if it is not. Another life, the issue may be clear to you. It could be clear in this life if you accepted my suggestion.