BROTHER OF MINE:

There is entering into your life a little discouragement, a faint inner disgust with yourself and a sense of failure which - if persisted in - may damage the beautiful thing you are building. Such thoughts are not constructive in their effect. In what does this discouragement arise?

It is to be found in your realization that your inner knowledge far outstrips your outer usefulness. It grows out of your intelligent awareness that the inner worlds hold for you much of interest which you never bring through for use on the physical plane. This is so. You are a deeply versed occult student and your grasp of the inner occult realities far outstrips that of the average student. But it is all introverted; it does not emerge for the helping of the world; it is accumulating and piling up within you and, unless you make some definite use of it, you may bring about a condition which it will be difficult later to change. What causes this condition, my brother?

Three things which I, with frankness, will put before you because you can be trusted to take with gratitude anything that may be said. The test for you comes in the use you make of the information which I give you as with other knowledges you acquire.

1. Your inner sense of inferiority (a racial inheritance) is a definite handicap. In your executive life in a great city, this inferiority complex is negated a great deal because you see the fruits of your labor; but in the sensitive life of the inner planes, you succumb to it constantly; so great and so rapid is your reaction to the truth and to the inner realities that you promptly absorb much more than you can use. You are rendered almost dizzy by the radiant kaleidoscope of truth which you sense and contact.
2. You are handicapped by your physical body. You have inherited (for the fulfilment of karmic responsibilities) a not particularly high grade body of Slavic-Semitic type with a touch of the Latin intermixed. That heritage gives you your steadfastness and your persistence upon the Way; it gives you your sensitivity to things of the mystical realm; it gives you also your love of beauty and your heart development. It has revealed [361] to you a little of the mystery of pain and of suffering. But it has also given you a physical body which has inherited the power to resist and the capacity to shut off the outer from the inner worlds of expression. Besides this, it has endowed you with a body of somewhat heavy and inert atoms which cannot be galvanized into the exquisite activity of which you dream except by tremendous effort and a self-imposed discipline of a drastic nature. Hence your soul's choice of your personality job - one that embodies service, that appeals to the heart and which at the same time is of so necessary a nature that it per force calls forth your best effort.
3. The third cause of trouble is found in the fact that you are not making outer constructive use of the knowledge which you acquire in meditation, through wide reading and through your constant, interior thinking.

My attention has been called to your meditation reports. My brother, you touch and tap constantly the fount of wisdom. Your intuition is awake; your power to interpret symbols is unusual; your grasp of the synthetic plan of the Great White Lodge is real. But of what use is it to anyone? You are like a reservoir which is too full and from which there is not enough withdrawn to meet the need of the surrounding thirsty country. All flows over the spillway and is wasted.

This must be rectified, my brother. One of the first things we must do is to employ the knowledge and the occult information which is stored up in your subconscious mind and which finds expression only in your spiritual diary and your meditation reports. I refer not here to the daily life to be lived. I refer to the intelligent appreciation of truth which is yours, to the wealth of your occult information which is being wasted and causing conditions which will lead to eventual astral trouble. You do endeavor to live the life and to serve but I seek to see that service fed by your occult knowledge and by your head and not just by your heart. It is essential that we tap the reservoir and make your life fruitful as an esotericist... What therefore, shall we do?

First, instead of constant meditation, you must employ the time so given to the enlarging upon and the writing out of the ideas which have come to you so that they can be used by [362] others and can reach those who need help... Expressed symbolically, what I have to say to you can be embodied in the words of an ancient Book of Rules for disciples which was extant at the time of the first Patanjali:

"The door opens into the world of that which can be known. It opens from the side of mind. Once open, there enters into thought the dropping rain of that which can be known. The other door opens through deep desire. It opens into the world which is that which all men know. When both the doors stand open wide, the disciple serves the purpose of the Lord of Truth. The rain drops on his heart from out the farthest door. He pours the rain of that which can be known into the world of that which all men know. Thus new thoughts can be carried into the hearts of men. Thus new flowers of ideas bring beauty to the dusty plains of earth."