Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the LORD. Isaiah 62:3
The word crown has a double meaning. This word implies a proper circular movement, proper giving. All the bodies in space, which keep their energy, move along a circular orbit. What is true of space bodies is also true of human beings. Therefore a person, who wants to keep one’s energy, should move along a circular orbit, or put in simple words, this is a job done in the easiest of ways. The science that teaches methods of how to keep spiritual energy is very necessary for the proper development of human beings.
All modern sufferings – individual or common – result from the loss of Divine energy. While you were young, the energy you had in your organism was so much, that you were inclined to believe that it was inexhaustible forever. This, however, is just an illusion in earthly life. This energy can be lost the same way you can lose your money. It flows out of you just like water flows out of a cracked bottle. Similarly some wine-makers pour sweet wine in bottles and bury it in the ground for several years, where it ferments slowly. During this time, a certain quantity of carbon dioxide is formed in the wine, therefore it should be opened with utmost care, because all the liquid can burst out at once. Likewise, human energy, stored in the human soul, can at times flow out at once, which is what happens at times of great joy or great sorrow. This is why one should know how to rejoice and how to grieve. This is also an art. No mistakes should be made in this respect, because one may be harmed. I shall give you an example, which clearly shows the impact of great joy: an English ship, worth about four to five million leva was raffled in Tsarigrad1. It went to a porter, who was invited to go and see what he had won. However, along the way, the porter went crazy out of joy. Now people go crazy due to a great joy or great sorrow. What does crazy mean? This is a loss of spiritual energy or the inability to comprehend spiritual language. There is no point in being too glad, but we should not be too grievous either, because great joy implies great grief and vice versa. This is a true law. You say, ‘When we go to Heavens, we will be very glad, but when we descend to Hell, we will be grieved’. These are two opposite poles. You, who do not understand the Divine principles, who are not familiar with them, say, ‘Why do those, who are down there in Hell, suffer?’ I would ask you, however, ‘Why are those, who are up there, rejoicing?’ What is the difference between suffering and joy? Grief results from the fact that we have lost what was given to us. For example, if we lose our health, money, hearing or something else, we will be aggrieved.
Hence, we have to learn to keep what God has given us. In order to be able to keep what was given to us, we shall have to inevitably double our energy, to which purpose there is a principle in the Gospel: doubling is actually the principle of sowing; if farmers do not sow, they will lose. In this respect your mind is a field, which has to be sown. God has placed the seed in your depository, and when the right time comes, God says, ‘Sow the field!’ You answer, ‘I shall not sow this year, because I have plenty of food, I shall take a rest’. You leave your minds uncultivated and they, to put it scientifically, fall in atrophy. The core art in keeping spiritual energy is the cultivation of the human mind. There are three ways to spend human energy: firstly, in the physical organism – through your hands, legs, muscles, stomach, lungs; secondly, through human thought and reasoning; and thirdly, through human passions.
Most dangerous of all, in terms of spending energy, are human passions. Those persons, who complain that their memory grows fainter, they will know that passions have taken the upper hand in them. This can be noticed in young girls and boys at about fifteen-sixteen years of age. At this age, they start falling in love and therefore they start forgetting and cannot learn their lessons. This is also true of adults – they fall in love with other things, but this is no love, this only seems to be love, this is love for the drink. Any drunkard is in such a situation – he is in love with the glass, a glance at the glass can make any drunkard happy. There is a similar situation in respect of thoughts too: from an esoteric point of view, there are purely physical thoughts, there are thoughts of desires and there are spiritual thoughts. The thoughts of desires are the thoughts that bring suffering to contemporary society, i.e. such is the epoch we, the people, live in today.
This movement is within us; this striving should be a crown in the hand of the Lord. By the hand of the Lord we understand God’s Will. One should have a strong will in contemporary society and I will give you methods to strengthen your will. You believe you have a will. Yes, you do, but this is an ordinary will. In order to have a will, you should know how to move in a circle. In America, there are chairs called rocking chairs, which are the most foolish invention. Whoever sits on such a chair gets rocked. Do not sit on such chairs; do not rock. When we want to get apples down from the tree, we shake the tree. When you have an unvaried thought – say for example that you do not love someone, you send thoughts from you to him and from him to you, which is just like sitting on the rocking chair, and within less than a day or two you will feel spiritually upset. You will ask me why someone called you by an offensive name. That person must have called you so in order to try your will. The Scripture reads, ‘you need a helmet, to repel the foe’. The foes from the invisible world may only fling one bad thought at you through anybody – through your wife, through your husband, through your children or through somebody else; even those whom you love most, can toss a thought to you which you do not expect. You have to beat off every thought! You have heard the old saying, ‘God will do everything’. How can he do everything? Let’s assume that you grow and feed silk worms in a room and then you let in a boy of two or three years of age. What will the boy do with the silk worms? He will go round and smash all of them. The same will happen when you let a two-year old thought of yours in the most sacred of all of your rooms and within an hour it will have smashed all your silk worms. By silk worms, I mean certain types of thoughts, actions or desires of your will.
We have to follow strictly the methods which nature applies in our lives. In nature we can never imagine the Sun to be a dark circle, because it would not be any Sun then, we always picture it as a light circle. Light is a circular movement. Firstly, you impart into your mind that each thought, desire or action, which penetrates us, is sent from the Invisible world and keep in mind that whatever happens to you, has had to happen inevitably! If you understand these principles of movement, you will know that a thought, which was thrown away by somebody and which has travelled from the one end of your orbit to the opposite end, will fall away on its own. If you are at this end, you will be able to understand it; therefore never grasp a newly arrived thought at the moment it crosses your orbit at the one end. Therefore Christ says, ‘Do not oppose the evil’. This means; do not oppose, but stay at the other end and try to catch it.
You will certainly need experience now. What does this experience consist of? Many have asked me the question of how to develop, to make progress, how to see this or that? I would like you not only to see, but also to acquire things. You may see a wheat grain – this is one thing, if you take it and sow it – this is another thing. So it is not sufficient to feel one Divine thought that is granted to you, but you have to acquire and apply it. Say for example you want to see an angel. You may see as many angels as you wish, you may go to them, but when you come back, you are still the same, you only recount what you have seen as performance and this is the end of the issue. You have to learn these principles. It is important when you see an angel, to interact with the angel’s intelligence, with the angel’s spirit. The same is true of Nature – it all starts with feeling and then comes seeing. There are many animals that neither feel, nor see. One day when they grow up, when they come to where we are now, they will say, ‘We can now see what our obstacle in life was’.
I will give you an exercise to do for about a month. Many of you can do it. Do not think that when you experiment, everything is pleasant and everything leads to results. Sometimes there may be a bad result, but this should not discourage you. Sometimes the worst results have the best of effects. I shall give you an example to elaborate on this thought: a wife of a Turk laughed a lot, her jaw got dislocated and her mouth was distorted. Many doctors were called to fix her jaw, but none of them could do anything. Therefore one day her husband took her in his cart to drive her to a very good doctor. Along the road, however, the horses got scared, over-turned the cart, the wife fell on the ground and thus her jaw was fixed and back to normal. The Turk wanted to visit a famous doctor and see whether the doctor could help his wife, but God found it good for the woman to fall off the cart and thus to get her jaw fixed… This is why you should not consider that falling off a cart is something bad; on the contrary, it will restore your jaw back to normal.
The experiment consists of the following: firstly, when a thought of hatred comes up within you, it should be transformed into love! I shall give you a methodology how to transform hatred into love: try to put yourselves in the shoes of the person you hate; assume that you also make the same mistake in respect of God and say, ‘God loves me despite of all of my mistakes, therefore I will do the same to that person too – I will love that person!’ Whatever mistake this person could have made or whatever his or her behaviour might have been to you, you are in the same situation in respect of God. God has not changed his attitude to you. He loves you. Start moving your thought from you to God, and then start moving it from you to others – to the person you hate. The love, that God has for you, will pass on from you to the other person and the other person will be placed in the same situation in respect of you, as you are to God, i.e. the attitude will be generated in the mind of that person.
Secondly, during the entire month, do not spread any gossip about anybody, or if gossip is spread about you, keep silent, pretend this does not concern you. You may be a little sulky, but consider this is another person, not you. If a woman places her hands into stale dough, are her hands stale too? Even if your whole body goes stale, believe that your soul is not stale. Do not assume that external staleness is necessarily internal. Do not think it is easy to give up gossiping, this is a serious business. I do not want you to refrain from gossiping for a lifetime. I want you to refrain only for one month, to test your will.
When I ask you to transform hatred into love, the former shall not disappear all of a sudden; it will keep on showing up. If you succeed in all of your experiments, you will feel an internal peace and acquisition of a drop of energy. However, if one day you fail to succeed in your experiment, you will lose a small part of your energy. You will be losing and gaining during these thirty days, but what counts is that the final result should be good. You may fall off the cart, but in the end, you jaw will be restored back to normal. I give you these two experiments, because they take effect along the natural Path, according to which the angels work now in the world. They will assist you.
Thirdly, produce a good thought within you and keep it for the whole month. When you make this experiment, you should always think that you are free, do not think that the external world or your attitudes to people can counteract you. Before starting the experiment you will say the following, ‘At this moment when I start this experiment, through the Might of God which is in me, I can do anything!’ Do not be confused by the word anything; it implies anything good, not anything evil as well. There is no force that can beat you at this moment. In your mind you should keep alive the thought of ‘whenever one wants to do something good, the Divine conscience is vigilant. As soon as you decide to do a good deed, there comes a bond between you and God, a conversation is started. The moment you decide to do good for God’s sake, God takes care of you.
These three experiments, which I give you, will be the foundation for the renovation of your thoughts and hearts, before you start fighting. I can see that quite a few of you live the life of people buying lottery tickets and waiting for something good to come down their way. The second year they buy a ticket again, and again in the third year, but there are no sure chances that any gain will come their way. This is not the way leading to the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God can be taken by Force, knowledge is acquired by Force, and everything in the world is acquired by Force. By Force means through those wise creatures placed higher up than the angels. These are the Divine Forces and through them everything can be acquired. These creatures are the archangels.
Later on, when you will have done these experiments you will be able to get rid of rheumatism, headache, heartache, tuberculosis and other diseases, which exist not only in the organism, but up there in the mind, and in the heart.
The Scripture reads, ‘Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord’. Crown should be understood to mean most supreme angelic Creatures. To have a crown of the Lord is to bond with the supreme spirits of Love, who are the spring of Divine Love. Anybody, drinking from this spring, shall no longer be thirsty. There are two categories: a crown and glory. Glory – these are the archangels, who are the bearers of God’s Will in the physical field. When you want to strengthen your will, you will call an archangel who is mighty and strong. This is one principle, which works without any suggestion. The ideal the mother had, before she conceived, her child will be exactly like this. Our thoughts and desires become exactly like the creatures we think of at a particular moment. If a maid is in love with a stupid lad, such will her child be. She looks upon the lad through different eyes, she imagines him to be much more ideal, while in fact he is not; her imagination is one state of affairs which does not correspond to the state it manifests itself. We should not be looking at the lad’s soul, but at his manifestations. We should not be looking at his outer appearance, that he is handsome, that he is neat and tidy etc. He may be neat and tidy at one point of time, but such a tidy horse has no intelligence. I understand movements in terms of wisdom. Tidiness, I understand as a case when someone fixes your broken leg or relieves you when you feel indisposed. Let’s take, for example, somebody whom we believe is tidy. He goes to a prayer meeting and has bad thoughts about one person and about another person. These are the tidy people, who spoil the mood of a prayer meeting; these are the good-looking maids and lads, these are the dark-eyed and dark-haired people. If you are tidy you have to go out predisposed, and to predispose others also. Different is the crown and the glory of the Lord and, indeed, in such a meeting one soon gets older. How can you not get older? If I start punishing one of you all the time for being ugly, you will see that within a month this person will darken. If you keep telling somebody that he or she is good looking, this person will improve. When I sometimes see darkened people, I say, ‘Somebody must have been working upon you!’ I do not want worms inside God’s home. If there are worms, let them stay outside! If I catch anybody, I will throw out such a person over the fence. And those who do their experiments well, if they have fallen over the fence, I will take such people back. This is an excellent experience.
When I decided to speak to women, it was raining. And I told myself, ‘This rain shows that women are not lucky’. But I see the weather improved today. This indicates that women are also given credit. The shining Sun indicates an agreement as well. This is not merely comfort; these are facts.
When you decide to start with the first experiment, do not let yourself stumble over anything. Do not waste your feelings, your thoughts and religious beliefs that you have. Each man or woman should apply his or her experience. We have come down to Earth to gain, so that we return richer to God. Not losing is easy, but to gain is an art, because the minds of many of you are idle. This loss is called by esoteric scientists demagnetising. If you cannot do these assigned experiments on your own, ask somebody else to help you, and work together. You have to have patience in all this work. You should usually start with the experiments in the morning or when you feel like doing them. You may ask whether your prayers will be accepted. We are bound to pray, but should not be interested whether God will accept our prayers or not.
In order to be successful in this life, you need a strong will, a strong mind and a strong heart. These can be acquired only through a pure and holy life. Without these no success can come to you. If you go over the entire history, from one end to the other, the most successful have been those men and women who lived a most pure and holy life. Do not think it is easy to be a pure and holy human being. If you are soiled you must have been drinking and you must have fallen. Altogether, purity and holiness have the upper hand in the world. We are wrong to think that we were conceived by our mothers in sin. Anybody who does not follow God’s Will was conceived in sin, while those who follow God’s Will were not conceived in sin. Some say, ‘We are sinful’. Yes, we are, I do not deny that we make mistakes, but I do deny that we were conceived in sin. Anybody following God’s Will was conceived in Love.
Christ wants human beings to be righteous in their souls – what one is above; the same one must be below. You are worried – do not hide it. When you are worried, this means that your children, who are within you, are very unwise. But this will be taken care of too. By doing these exercises all difficulties will fade away and bliss will come to the world. In this way, we will finally make people not steal and not lie. You will now train your will in order to become pure and holy. When you attain this you will have the will power to pick fruit from the Tree of Life, to see that everything is possible. This is the only way to make life interesting. From now on, you will always be at School. So far, you have not attended such a School. Up to now, you have been washing the dishes, chopping onions and so on, from now you will make a start with the letter a, which is the voice of the will.
This is the only way to apply your will.
Master’s lecture
Delivered on 26 June 1918 *
* This lecture and the previous one are immediately after one another in a common paper in the decoded shorthand notes, having only one date (26.06.1918) in the beginning. It is possible that Saving Spiritual Energy lecture was delivered later. (Editor’s notes).
1 Previous name of Constantinople.
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