The Masters of Wisdom approach our relationship with the Presence through attention, discrimination, and the preparation of the inner bodies. Kuthumi explains how personal desires and old impressions can influence what we receive inwardly, while the other Masters develop the importance of balance and service. Together, their messages help us recognize the qualities through which spiritual guidance can find a trustworthy expression.

MAHA CHOHAN

If we could hold the attention of any of you as long as you can entertain a hurt feeling or a sense of privation, we would have the open door to your complete freedom.

You, in the Western world, do not know discipline of mind, emotions or body, but, for those of you who aspire to mastery, the easiest way to achieve peace is to throw the full power of your attention all the time on some good manifestation of life—it may be either a God-quality in yourself or another, a beautiful inspiring picture or poem, or a Master’s words or likeness. However, you must be constantly alert as to that upon which you allow your attention to rest. For instance, you would not deliberately drink arsenic or iodine, yet you poison your whole lifestream every time that you allow yourself to see or record less than God’s full perfection by permitting your life energy, through your attention, to rest upon discordant appearances.

EL MORYA

Reason and intellectual knowledge carry the pilgrim across the plains, where the grass grows green and the sun shines, and now and again, on the horizon, the white-capped Mount of Attainment shines before the dazzled sight of the hopeful aspirant.

Pilgrims on the path oftimes become so enamored of the height and beauty of the mountaintop, that they become almost drunken with joy at their pursuit and it is only the unseen, but ever-present messengers of God who accompany them, that know of the perilous path between their present happy flight and the summit of that Mount of Attainment.

When man first came forth from God, he created a bridge by the beam of his own attention, and he crossed on it from Paradise to earth. After the descent, most men forgot their divine origin, and, as the bridge was built of the beam of their own life energy, it would have become entirely disintegrated—thereby forever cutting off their return—were it not for the strong and valiant souls who volunteered to come and guard them. These guardian spirits while moving with men in the world of form, yet kept their attention on the heights, so that a thread of the bridge might always remain unbroken as a path of return to the Father’s home, when the free will of the individual so prompted him to seek that freedom.

KUTHUMI

Every lifestream on the path, sooner or later, comes to a certain point where he begins to turn to the “still small voice” within the heart. At first, the individual begins to rely on intuition, then on inspiration, and, later still, upon that conscious contact which precedes self-conscious mastery, the attainment of which constitutes his divine freedom from all human concepts and all human form.

This is the most difficult point upon the spiritual path and I ask that when you come to the place where you enter into the heart of the Silence—where you commune with your own God-self—that you be extremely wise, alert and careful of the response that you will receive first of all from your own bodies because you are a complex mechanism, a sevenfold being. Now, whereas the glory of your Electronic Body, your Causal Body and your Holy Christ Self can never lead you astray—your lower bodies have voices, this consciousness and this intelligence of their own, and these voices, this consciousness and this intelligence within them, endeavors often to serve its own selfish ends, through you.

One of the chief requirements for spiritual mastery is discrimination. Call to me, if you wish, to my beloved Lord Maitreya, or to the great Lord Buddha for that discrimination wherein you may recognize the voice of the Silence. Know, always, that the prompting which builds up the personality, that which gives aggrandizement to the human ego, is not the “still small voice” of the Presence, but rather the etheric rumblings of your own past experiences, the emotional desires of your feeling word, or mental concepts and precepts from your past lives.

Remember, you have sat in the past before many teachers, who have given forth both truth and fallacy, and into your mental and emotional bodies and your etheric consciousness are builded those concepts, some of them solidified and petrified and lying dormant within them for centuries. As the flame begins to surge through you, these concepts are re-vivified and come forth, and you must recognize them for what they are—not necessarily the voice of truth!

As you proceed into an understanding of the Voice of the Silence, know that that which makes you pure, that which makes you harmonious, is of God. The feelings that stir within your heart that desire to make this star a planet of light, to relieve the burden of your fellowman, to raise those in pain and distress into understanding and harmony, that is of light. That which decreases the personality and increases the power of Christ, that is of God!

THE VENETIAN

The conscious connection between the outer mind and the Inner Presence of each lifestream must be re-established, through the development of harmony and balance in the lifestream. When man took his attention away from that Presence as the directing intelligence behind all activities, he forfeited the natural heritage of his being and for centuries he has groped in the darkness, seeking guidance from all manners of form, rather than God. Now, again, man desires to understand his purpose in being and opens the door through which we may, in time, reestablish this natural, conscious contact with the God-presence. We all bend the energies of our lives to this end.

SERAPIS BEY

The inner bodies of the student must be purified and balanced before he can, with any degree of accuracy, even sense the directions of the God-presence with accuracy. The tendency of the awakening spiritual fire is to energize the records in the mental, emotional, etheric and physical consciousness, and it is often these energized memories that are mistaken for revelations of a mystical nature, which lead earnest hearts astray. Let the sincere aspirant remember that humility, kindliness, selfeffacement, purity, and gentleness of spirit are the measures of the spiritual Presence in man.

HILARION

If an individual seeking Godliness, health, happiness and supply could first understand the power of sustained attention, and then through self-conscious endeavor wrest the attention away from the many pulls of the appearance world and anchor that attention on the presence of God—God’s presence would flow through him on the return currents as the fullness of all he could desire. Saint Germain has said repeatedly, “Where your attention is, there you are; what your attention is upon, that you become.”

Radiation and God’s love and mercy flow through the universe and man is entirely unaware of it. This outpouring of God’s forgiveness affects the just and the unjust alike, but the lever for the man who desires to move forward in self-conscious action lies in the controlled power of his attention!

JESUS

There comes the period upon the path when the inner powers strive for ascendancy and the outer consciousness endeavors to retain its hold upon the temple. He who carries the awakening Christ within his breast and has not yet learned the secret of surrender to that Christ, is restless, indeed. I carried this breathing God-power through every known channel of learning, hoping that its thirst might there be quenched and I would know peace. At last, in the retreat in Arabia, the words of my friend, John the Baptist, became clear to me—in speaking of the surrender of this outer ego to the Christ—”I must decrease that Thou might increase.”

SAINT GERMAIN

Reams of literature have been written adding to the store of occult and metaphysical knowledge, but the requirement of the hour is to present simple instructions which can be applied individually and collectively in tying the energies of the mankind of earth to the energies of the Great White Brotherhood in cooperative, current service.

It is not enough to enjoy the mystical experiences of the saints, sages and initiates of the past, nor—vicariously—to thrill to the exaltation of a brother’s or a sister’s attainment, nor to have a mental perception of the intricate plan of creation. The fact that the world and its individual evolution, for all this knowledge, still remains bound, is indisputable proof that current service, wherein the student is stimulated by the knowledge of his capacity to participate in the services engaging the energies of the Hierarchy at this present moment, is the action of the Law which will prove most efficacious in the forward progress of the race at this time.