SERVING YOUR APPRENTICESHIP
Chapter Three
SERVING YOUR APPRENTICESHIP
The soul knows before it incarnates what it has to do. You do not start your physical existence as a spirit without any awareness of itself. The spirit chooses the vehicle of its incarnation because it knows that that combination of circumstances will provide the best opportunities for the necessary unfoldment it has to undergo. Once it incarnates into matter, the denseness prevents the aware-ness, which is embedded deep down, from reaching your consciousness.
The great difficulty of people who live in your world is that they look at life, through no fault of their own, from the wrong perspective. They see life only in earthly and material terms. Life is not only earthly and material. It is spiritual, it is eternal. You cannot judge eternity by its physical span. If you do, your judgment is incomplete. It does not take cognisance of all the factors of compensation that are available to every child of the Great Spirit.
There is a plan, but it is not so rigid that those who par-ticipate in it are marionettes. You do not just dance to a string. You are imbued with part of the divine spirit. You have the chance of sharing in the process of infinite creation. Thus, you have personal responsibility and a measure of free will, but not so great that you can counteract the operation of any natural laws. Within their scope you have the power to choose. Your supreme destiny is fixed, but it is for you to unfold your latent divinity with the blue-print that you have.
You may not even be aware of the blue-print, but the soul, because it is divine, is restless, surging, striving to express itself. Sometimes it takes an experience like mourn-ing, sorrow, suffering or illness to awaken you out of your torpor and the soul comes into its own. If the Great Spirit did not wish you to have the privilege of sharing in creation, and by so doing expressing your latent divinity, there would be no point in your being born. That is the balance that you must strike, whether you so expand your character that you choose to develop the latent gifts that you have in service that enables them to burgeon.
A dual process is at work. The bombardment is not only from without but from within. Locked within your soul is an energy greater than any known in the physical world because it is part of the Great Spirit. Without it there could
be no life, for life is spirit. All matter is but the shadow, the husk of the reality which is spirit. The extent to which you are susceptible to these dual forces depends upon your awareness.
Spirit is life, life is spirit. There is no life apart from spirit, Matter is a husk, a shell, a shadow cast by the reality which is spirit. Matter of itself has no existence. You live, breathe, move, think, judge, reflect, sum up, decide, weigh, ponder, consider, think, because you are spirit. Spirit animates your frame. When spirit departs the body crumbles into the dust from which it was originally evolved. Those who worship the things of matter are bowing to false idols. There is no reality in them. Their existence is but temporary.
Spirit endures because it is the primal stuff of which all being and existence are composed. The life force expressed in human form is a variation of that expressed in bird, animal, fish, tree, flower, fruit and vegetable. Wherever there is any manifestation of life that is spirit at work.
There are degrees of awareness, degrees of consciousness, because spirit has an infinite number of manifestations. No limits can be set to infinity. You call God the power behind life, I call it the Great Spirit, because it is the apex, the origin, the summit of all spirit. All these manifestations, whatever form they may take, are expressions of the divine power which is their originator.
I regret that the path of those who serve is not easy. I did not make the laws, I only know how they operate. It cannot be that those who are to perform the greatest service should escape from the difficulties and the problems that touch the very depths of their souls, and stir into activity all those hidden powers which must be brought to the surface if the instrument is to be used.
The coin of service has its obverse side. The server must be able to serve because his own soul has been touched to the uttermost. It is only by plumbing the depths of the soul that the gifts of the spirit which that individual possesses can attain the bloom of their maturity. Sometimes I wish it were otherwise, that those who are destined to tread this path of attainment and sacrifice could live metaphorically in a bed of roses. But even the most beautiful rose has its thorns.
These are part of the truths of the spirit and I cannot change them. It would be false of me to say something which I know is not true. But the infinite spirit is perfect justice in operation. Perfect justice is something that the imperfectly operating mind of man on earth and, indeed in many spheres in our world, cannot comprehend. There is compensation and there is retribution. The scales are per-fectly adjusted. No soul loses through sacrifice and no soul gains through selfishness. The index of an evolved soul, and of its attainment, is the degree to which it has lived in the Garden of Gethsemane and has thus been able to achieve its Mount of Transfiguration. This is the law of divine love in action.
There is all manner of service, some in the glare of the lights, other in the quietness of the sanctuary. What is important is that the service is given. It is important that an awareness of spiritual realities should be given to those who are ready to receive them. In a world filled with dismay and dread, when millions are fearful of what the morrow will bring, it is important that there should be an understanding of what life truly is, not its surface, but its reality.
It is important for man to know that he is an infinite soul, that his earthly pilgrimage is a small but necessary part of an eternal life. He should live that life, not in the darkness of ignorance, but in the sunlight of knowledge, not with shoulders bowed, but with head erect, not with fear, but with glorious, radiant serenity.
You are not building for the day. It is not the temporary result, the quick, brief victory. It is part of an eternal plan, an infinite campaign on which you are engaged. You cannot measure the results of what is achieved. Today, throughout many countries, what seemed formidable walls are crumb-ling, vested interests are being shaken, monopolies are breaking down, superstition is receding, ignorance is being driven back by the slowly advancing forces of spiritual truth.
Your fears are needless and groundless. You are in very capable hands. You are the recipient of a power which has sustained you through all the years, and without it you would have left the earth a long time ago. Fear is the greatest corrosive influence on all the things of the spirit. Fear and anxiety are the two enemies on which we constantly have to wage war because they impede the channels by which the power of the spirit can produce results.
If you always lived in the light, then the light would be of little value to you. It is because you live for many years in the darkness that the light comes with such a revelation. You must go through your apprenticeship in this world before you can qualify for ours. Those who attempt to cut short their service find they do not enjoy what our world has to offer them, not for a long time.
The plan of life is very simple. You come from spirit, incarnating into matter to obtain the experiences you need to enable you to come to our world equipped for the tasks and the joys that await you. The equipment is obtained in your world. That is where you learn the lessons that prepare you for the life after school. If you do not learn the lessons, then you are not educated, not ready for what comes next. That is true in your world and it is so in our world, too.
The wind is always tempered to the shorn lamb. The accounts in the ledger of the Great Spirit are balanced with perfect exactitude, with compensation and retribution, precisely designed to fit every action. This is another way of saying that effect follows cause inexorably. Whatever the suffering so exactly is the compensation which is the result of that suffering. Whatever the lesson, so precisely is the knowledge gained from that lesson. You cannot have one without the other. How else can you gain knowledge without learning the lesson? And then having gained the knowledge, you have the responsibility of what knowledge brings. He who sins in ignorance is not so great an offender as he who sins with knowledge, for he knows what he is doing.
You are imperfect beings with latent perfection striving to express itself. The war between matter and spirit con-stantly raging in your lives means that you must sin, as it is called, or make mistakes, as I prefer to call them. If you did not make mistakes you would be perfect, and nobody is in your world or in mine. That is why the Great Spirit puts you in a world of matter so that out of the interplay between action and reaction of material and spiritual forces the innate divinity learns to find expression.
It is through shadow and darkness that
you come into the light. It is through storm that you come into sunshine. It is through difficulty that you come to attain. It is through conflict that you reach peace. Life can only be achieved through comparisons. Were your paths one even monotone, there would be no unfoldment. The development comes through the clash of varying circumstances which mould and mature the latent spirit. That is the whole plan of existence.
Sometimes, to those who ponder, it seems that life is harder for some than for others. Some are freed from pain, aches, cares and strife, while others seem to live in the shadows, hardly ever seeing the light. But that is not the whole of the picture. Even if it were it would not take cognisance of eternal factors which are yet to make them-selves known. I have lived much longer than you have and as a result have become a little more familiar with the work-ing of the law to which I always pay my tribute, for I have never known it to fail. I have never met a soul in my world to whom injustice has been done, who could say, "Now that I have seen both sides of my account, they do not balance." The Great Spirit does not make mistakes. If the Great Spirit could make mistakes the universe could not continue for another day. Long before you came into this world it was in existence and long after you have departed from it, it will still go on. Millions of years ago the sun, a great orb of light and heat and warmth, without which earthly life is impossible, shed its rays when there were no living souls in your world. The sun continued to radiate all that energy when apparently there were no human beings to receive it. Today you burn coal and release all the sun's imprisoned energy placed there millions of years ago. What a lesson in patience.
Do not harbour impatience or resentment. These defeat their own ends. The power that can reveal itself to you requires serene conditions. There is a framework, a pattern, and only within that framework and pattern can natural law operate. The Great Spirit cannot operate outside His own laws. If you want guidance and help you must provide the conditions by which guidance and help come to you. You must use the experience to build your own soul which is the only eternal possession you have. You must have con-fidence that the power which gave you life can sustain you, because you are a part of it and it resides within your own being. And if you provide the right conditions, that divine power resident within your own nature, has as part of its heritage the armoury of the spirit to give you all the weapons you require for every battle in life. But impatience and resentment, these are obstacles to the full, free, flowing of divine power.
You must relax, be receptive, calm, passive, quiescent, tranquil, serene, confident. You must know within that all will be well and in that spirit everything you require that is essential for your needs will come. You will not receive any credit for the easy things of life, only for the difficult ones. The Great Spirit cannot fail, you can fail the Great Spirit. Confronted with difficulty, muster the divine reserve and have perfect trust that the way is shown, and if you have perfect trust, the way must be shown. This is what I have taught for many years because it is true. Those who are able to apply this truth know that it does work. Matter is the servant of spirit; spirit is not the servant of matter. You live and breathe and move, not because of your physical body. Without the spirit that could not exist. Indeed, when spirit withdraws, the body crumbles.
Soul-mastery is not easy. If it were easy it would not be worth the having. There are no short cuts to supremacy. There is no royal road. Each soul must climb and toil for himself. But it is a great spiritual adventure full of exhilara-tion as you climb the peaks.