Two Talks from the Masters

Here is another extract from the book Meeting the Masters, the story of how I was contacted and instructed by high spiritual beings starting in 1979 and continuing for the next twenty one years. The parts in bold are my notes of the time (which was 1979) and then follow my more recent comments on the pair of talks. I include these two talks because I think they give a good (though limited) idea of the Masters and the reality of their world, but also helpful tips on how the spiritually sensitive person may live in this world whilst always keeping his or her true home in mind.

March 28th 
A Master who had not come before and who radiated great love came. He said that where he was all was poetry, music and colour as the vibrations were much higher than on the earth plane. I was going down a river and there would be eddies, currents and even waterfalls but one day it would flow into the sea of tranquillity. He told me to love Michael as he was their messenger and worked unceasingly for me. The Masters were always with us and sent love from their sphere from where I had come and to which I would eventually return. I asked him how I could become more detached and less upset at the lack of beauty in the world. He told me that I must not let beauty possess me but I should salute it and be grateful for it, letting all feelings of possession and upset roll off me like water from a swan’s back. I should not hide from ugliness but face it and seek to understand it. I could never lose beauty but beauty could lose me if I let myself become attached to it. He ended by saying that beauty had sent me to earth to do my duty and I should do it gladly.

April 3rd 

The Master told me that I was in a most critical period on my path to the heavenly plane which was my home. He said that the Masters constantly rained down beauty from these planes onto me to give me inspiration and support but I must not allow myself to get carried away by this. The force was strong and could be unsettling but I must learn how to deal with it in a mature and balanced way. He told me to imagine an armour of light around me that would protect me from the evil influences when they attacked which they frequently would. He emphasised that I should love Michael as love was essential for progress. He said do not think of love as a feeling desirable for a spiritual person to have but as the reality of the higher worlds without which no-one could gain entry.

   I well remember the impression made by this Master when he spoke to me of the higher planes on these two nights. He had not come before and he had about him a loving tenderness which drew from me a devoted response. Previously some of the Masters had emanated a majestic power and authority while others had seemed the embodiment of profound wisdom. Of course all the Masters possessed all of these qualities to a high degree but they each had a certain keynote to their presence that was quite noticeable despite their essential oneness. This clearly demonstrated that the realisation of universal consciousness does not eradicate the individual. I think this is an important point. The reason Jesus and the Buddha elicit such love is because, while manifesting the universal, they are not remote, withdrawn, distant, impersonal, unapproachable but fully, uniquely and lovably individual.

   The three primary attributes of God are spoken of in most traditions as love, wisdom and power, these corresponding on the human level to feeling, mind and will. Occultism talks of seven rays or divine qualities of which the principal three are described as Will, Love and Intelligence which obviously refers to the same thing. All souls are said to come into being on one or other of the rays which stamps them with its imprint. Hence the different characteristics, or points of emphasis, of the Masters who would have developed to the fullest extent the potential of all the rays, insofar as they relate to the human kingdom, but retain a focus on one in particular.

   The subject of the seven rays is a fascinating one and some occultists go into great detail about the supposed attributes of these rays but I have to say that, although this kind of research may be interesting to pursue, it can easily become a sidetrack to the true spiritual path. Indeed it is fair to say that a more realistic objection to occultism than the traditional religious one, that the occultist is illegitimately delving into the unseen, is that it belongs to the form side of life, and true spirituality is about transcending form. It is surely significant that neither Jesus nor the Buddha nor any other great spiritual teacher was concerned with what we call the occult. No doubt they had intuitive and experiential knowledge of the hidden side of nature but they did not focus on that at all in their teachings. I am aware that many occultists regard themselves as initiates in possession of higher truths, and I don’t deny that they might have great knowledge, even power. But I’ve come to think that occultism can be an all too alluring diversion for the intellectually inclined. It exists in the realm of thought and multiplicity. Spiritual truth is simple as the Masters never tired of telling me and as they demonstrated in talks like these two. They undoubtedly possessed great occult knowledge but that was not something they appeared to regard as particularly important for the spiritual seeker. Their attitude would have been summed up by the words of Jesus when he said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all thing will be added to you” or in their own words which described love as the reality of the higher worlds without which no-one could gain entry.

   Here’s a thought. What is love? I make no apologies for returning to this subject regularly in the course of these pages. Never was a word so trivialised by overuse and to such an extent that even that statement is becoming a cliché. But still we don’t seem to get very far in our understanding of it. I have to admit I occasionally found the Masters’ constant emphasis on love to get a bit, dare I say it, dull. Yes, I know that God is love, please tell me something new that I don’t know. But did I really know it? Do you really know it? We are not told that God loves. We are told God is love. There is a world of difference between the two. Love, divine love, is not a feeling. It is a fundamental state of existence. As the Masters made clear, love is the reality of the higher worlds but we cannot truly know love in this sense as long as we have our current focus on self. You might say that one could not know love at all without self, and it is true that the possibility of love does come from the existence of the individual, but it is the identification with self that stops the flow of love and reduces it to the personal level. Divine love has no opposite and pours forth constantly. It is not dependent on anything. It is not conditional on anything. It does not require anything. We think we know love but we are really just paddling about in rock pools on the shores of the great ocean of love that the Masters bathe in perpetually. And yet even though we confine and limit it by our self-identification, even though we tarnish and corrupt it by our attachment and desire and possessiveness, love is our true nature. We are built of love and we know in our hearts that life and love are synonymous.