MY BELOVED BROTHER:

A.A.B. has just called my attention to the six statements which I gave you to reflect upon more than a year ago. Knowing all that you had been through in the interim and are now passing through, she realized how extremely apposite and suitable they had proved to be. Pain has engulfed you and yours; anxiety along many lines, and all of them severely testing, has been your lot. Had you not been "close to the feet of the Lord of your Life," you would have reached what might have been regarded as the valley of desperation.

Yet you have not been truly desperate because the "haze of blue" has protected you, your group brothers have stood as a shield around you, and the strength of my Ashram has been at your disposal. People often fail to realize the nature and the potency of that strength - a strength that comes from a deep impersonal love and from the realization that, in the light of the eternal verities, all pain is but temporary, all trouble and struggle ephemeral, and that we have passed oft this way before upon the unhappy little planet of suffering which we call the Earth. We come to know that we shall not pass this way so oft again. Did you grasp the significance of that sentence, my brother?

So be of good cheer, and look forward and out towards a future of service and of joy, and this because you have endeavored to live selflessly and to carry your load bravely, and because your life and deeds and your entire career have helped so many.

I would remind you that pain, when it is lived out mentally for others, is the worst kind of pain. This you know. But I would remind you that the capacity so to do and so to identify yourself with pain that is not specifically your own is something that all disciples have to master, because it is one of the first steps towards shouldering world pain and the agony of the human family, thus becoming a participant in the "fellowship of Christ's sufferings" and a lifter of world burdens. We work and live on a planet of pain. Until a man is an initiate of high degree he cannot even begin to sense the reasons why this is so; he must perforce then take refuge in the trite platitudes that suffering humanity has evolved to account for things as they are. None of these in any way approximate the true reasons or give any real insight into the problem. Men must wait for understanding until they can no longer be hurt or limited by the pain of others. This follows when we have learnt to handle our own pain. Then and only then can they begin to lift the burden of humanity as a whole and do their responsible share in lightening it.

We come again here to those contradictory and beautiful words: Isolated Unity. When one is isolated from form attachments and when one is freed for identification with the life aspect, then one can know the true meaning of unity, then one is released from pain and one is free to release others also.

Keep busy with my work, my brother, for there is naught left for the true disciple but the work of the Ashram, which is the work of the Hierarchy, which is work for humanity. Such is the outgoing sequence. For you now, it is not so much the eager, active, outer service, of which you have done so much in the past years, but it is the standing steady, and so becoming a channel and a link. Remember with care the words I gave you last year: "I now can serve by Being."

Do not strive so much, my brother. Accept life conditions as they are; acquiesce in the situation as it is; relax for the remainder of this incarnation, and exoterically rest from your labors and esoterically enter into light. Work not under such a sense of inner strain and effort. I refer not to the outer strains and stresses to which you are subjected for they exist and are hard and difficult. I refer to your own inner attitude of recognition and acquiescence, of Being and attainment.

Those are the four key thoughts for your personal reflection during the coming year. The year that is on its way will hold great changes for you but you are strong enough and experienced enough to carry through triumphantly. The coming months will hold for you revelation, and that revelation will enhance the light upon the Lighted Way which stretches out before you; they will hold opportunity for you also, if you learn the hard lesson of relinquishment, and when next year closes you may find yourself surprised at the distance you will find you have traveled, the enlightenment you may find you have gained, and the increased sphere of your subjective usefulness.