Vol. 61 No. 44 - Beloved Paul the Venetian- November 22, 2018
The Art of Loving God
Is in the Art of Loving Man
Part 2
At the current time I have been in consultation with the Master of Paris.1 Your beloved El Morya has also been in consultation with me.
The recent student unrest that so tore up the beauty of the land of France is most unfortunate.2 For while there is a great spirit of liberty here, the spirit of liberty is all over the world. Even in countries dominated by Communism, where freedom is practically nonexistent, there is still a flame of liberty. This flame of liberty is in the hearts of the people. But they have now, quite sadly, lost everything. For them there is no possibility of true freedom and its expression. They must function within the limitations that a dominant society and a dominated society has imposed upon them.
There is at the present hour, as you know, a coming forth into outer admission the statement by the Communists of the world that “we are behind the student revolts.”3 We have long known of the factors governing world unrest. We have spoken often to mankind about it, and we have desired that they do something to protect their interests. But, as the scriptures record so beautifully and delicately, “They were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day that Noah entered into the ark.”4 As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it also be in the days of the coming of the Son of man.5
Let the children of the Sun understand, then, that with all the perfection and beauty of God that is everywhere surrounding mankind, there is still a famine in the land and spiritual feasts are often ignored.
How many hungry hearts would desire tonight to sit at our feet as we bring forth to you our feeling of true symmetrical beauty, which stems from man’s cognition of the words of Christ, “I AM the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.”6
You are the husbandman. You are intended to create beautifully and wonderfully. Co-creators with God, you chisel line by line your spiritual form from the marvelous cosmic ideas that the Father released in the Beginning with the first thought of man’s reality: “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness. . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”7
And so it came to pass that this was done. Yet because of the vastness of cosmos and the myriad manifestations of life forms—the coming into manifestation of spiral nebulae and the birth and death of worlds and systems—there are coincidental manifestations, and time and space are great barriers to mortal men who are encased in the mold of human clay.
But this clay was fired in the kilns of heaven. The breath of the Holy Spirit fashioned even the physical form of man. The life dimensions over which men are given dominion are the dimensions of their consciousness, and consciousness is the treasure house that must be guarded and loved. Your consciousness creates its own matrices, its own shapes of things to come. Therefore the words “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”8 cannot be outdone as an expression of universal law.
In coming to you tonight and alerting you to the need to preserve the sense of infinite beauty, I am persuaded that the time is short for the mankind of earth unless there be a great awakening. And if it shall come to pass that men fail throughout the world to understand that they can live not in sadness, not in joy, but only in a mixture of sadness and joy, then it will be a great pity.
For man is not intended to have the consciousness of a yo-yo, to be pulled first up and then down. He is intended to preserve the consciousness of the Divine Image, which can never be unhappy, can never be discontented, can never be disturbed for long but can only suffer momentary excursions into the negative realm.
The negative realm is like a thorn. The negative realm is like thistles. The negative realm is one from which you would naturally recoil. But some have a morbid fascination for horror and destruction, for death. We are men of spiritual principle and we desire to see to it that you will, as men and women of the Divine One, also hold to the perfection of the Presence.
Therefore, I wish to say to you tonight that Master Morya and the Master of Paris have counseled that now that the Communists of the world have come out and openly admitted the situation concerning the youth of the world, it should indicate to the perceptive among you that they are confident of their strength.
There is now no time for dalliance, no time for indulgence in personal foibles and identifications, but it is a time to preserve the divine sense as never before. It is not enough to preserve it for yourself alone. There must be an invocation and an evocation of the perceptions of perfection among mankind.
Hope is not enough; faith must be evoked. Faith is not enough; action in manifestation must be evoked. And therefore, as I gaze upon the calendar of the future and I see the frame that men have put around the picture of life as it will be in a decade and another decade and yet another, I, being an artist with a soul and immortality, cringe from what I see and I pray and say, “O God, be merciful.”
Your Blessed Virgin, Mother Mary, prays with me. For the state of the world is most horrendous, with a quivering of destruction, and fear is in many hearts. We do not wish to amplify it, but we must alert the students of the light that the time is indeed, in all verity, short.
Your beloved messenger, who stands before you, has little idea himself as to the solemnity with which I am speaking these words. It is as much a surprise to him that I am saying this as it is to some of you. But strange as it may seem, I was chosen tonight and for this conference to sound out the note of warning. And I said, “What? I am chosen?” And the Lord Maha Chohan said to me, “By the power of the Holy Spirit, beloved Paul, I say to you that you are chosen. You, the gentle soul of the artist, must make men think. You have the power to mold thought and feeling. Paul, go forth and do it.”
Now, you know, blessed ones, that when the Maha Chohan speaks, one does not refuse.
Have you ever gazed upon the eyes of the Lord Maha Chohan? Even in heaven, in our ascended state, I once said to him, “I would like once again to take in my hand an earthly brush and palette and to paint the beauty of your face.” And do you know, precious ones, that the Lord Maha Chohan never answered me? He gave me a look that almost froze me in my tracks, and I never mentioned it again.
I hope you will understand that even at our level there is a preserved remnant of the personality. We are not a bunch of china dolls, painted faces, radiant light-forms that have no preservation of our identities whatsoever. We are yet embryonic gods in the becoming. For the transcendent outreach of the Divine is a magnificent hierarchical plan, bringing men, at different seasons and different times of their life, to fulfillment. And oh, how sweet it is.
How sweet it is, and what a thing of worth it is when individuals, who have long labored and striven for a certain development within their soul, are able to see at last that they have bridged the gap of temptation and that that temptation cannot move them to perform that which they do not really want to do but which they do anyway.9
What a wonderful thing it is when an individual can learn to steel himself from the judgments of men, when he is not affected by mortal opinions and mortal ideas, when he is able to decide his own course (as the ancient mariner and the Ancient of Days), when he is able to realize that to him is given the power of faith and vision and the execution of that vision and he realizes that his soul is like unto God, his job being to make it so.
Therefore, precious ones of the light, throughout this class I urge you to understand that the firecrackers of our words and ideas, the vital essences that we release, are themselves effective in the moment of their release and are to a certain degree according to your perceptions and acceptance. But the real role of our dictations in your affairs is to hold a permanent focus within your heart for the light.
It is an old image, but one highly loved by Saint Francis of Assisi, your beloved Kuthumi—the image of the crèche. I have often thought that this crèche, woven of beautiful wood, was intended to hold the Christ form, and I have regretted that so many have adorned the crèche with a crown of thorns. From the very beginning [those who have done so] have somehow sensed the misery that shall be theirs, and this draws to them misery.
I urge, therefore, that this [practice] be abandoned, that the heart be considered as the crèche of the Christ, that the miniature place where the Lord lay be prepared for him, not as a place of the skull or a time of suffering to come but as a time of joy, beauty, wholesomeness, relaxation, understanding, and as a flow of the golden shuttle of the Most High God’s thoughts.
The cosmic looms weave, and there is a majesty in the rapidity of the ingoing and outgoing of the shuttle. The thread unwinds and the span of life is lengthened and strengthened, and courage and fiber and majesty and dominion and beauty and eternal love are woven into the immortal picture.
You were created in the foreverness of God, for the foreverness of God, and by the foreverness of God. If this be so, then all that you create must endure for aye. And if all that you create must endure for aye but you create evilly,* then this would also endure for aye—but nay, it is not so. For that which does not hold the divine majesty is a leaky sieve, and fortunately the waters of life slip, then, through the sieve and descend into the eternal stream, once again to be used as formative essence.
Let all understand the passion of God, who, creating man in his own image, said that if the children of men, whom I have endowed with my own image, will not build me a house suitable for that image to dwell in,10 then I will give them time and space and opportunity. And behold, darkness will come upon them and they shall experience a mingling of darkness and light until the day when the last enemy shall be overcome and I shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.11 The eternal beauty of my realm shall be their enduring mind state. For the mind state of men is their consciousness, and as a man thinks, he becomes.
Will you, then, regard your days as days of service and nights of love and rest?
Will you, then, understand that the peace of the Presence wants to keep you blessed?
Will you understand that the art of loving God is to be learned in the art of loving man?
Will you understand that there are some things that manifest and are in the world of form that you cannot love, that you must not hate, but that you must shun?
For the Word is God.
I thank you.
*evilly adverb, archaic
“The Summit Lighthouse Sheds Its Radiance o’er All the World to Manifest as Pearls of Wisdom.”
This dictation by Paul the Venetian was delivered by the Messenger of the Great White Brotherhood Mark L. Prophet on Friday, July 5, 1968,during Freedom Class 1968, held in Colorado Springs, Colorado. [N.B. Bracketed words have been added for clarity in the written word.]
1. The Master of Paris is Chief of the Council of France. He is described as a tall gentleman with courtly grace who made his ascension more than 500 years ago. For more information, see The Masters and Their Retreats, pp. 269—70.
2. The recent student unrest. An article in Encyclopaedia Britannica explains that a student revolt at a Paris suburb campus was soon “joined by a general strike eventually involving some 10 million workers. During much of May 1968, Paris was engulfed in the worst rioting since the Popular Front era in the 1930s, and the rest of France was at a standstill. So serious was the revolt that in late May the French president, Charles de Gaulle, met secretly in Baden-Baden, West Germany, with General Jacques Massu, commander of the French occupation forces, to ensure Massu’s support in the event that his troops were needed to retake Paris from the revolutionaries.” The mass sit-ins, violent confrontations with police, and strikes across the nation brought hundreds of arrests and hospitalizations. The students and workers had been seeking social change, not a political one. The revolution indeed brought greater freedom of expression and opened the French society to many lasting changes. (“Events of May 1968,” by Richard Wolin, at britannica.com)
3. “We are behind the student revolts.” In general, Communist philosophy seeks to undermine capitalism and its societies. In the 1968 revolt in France, the Communists were allied with and in fact were leaders in the workers’ unions. Although the revolt began with students, more than 10 million workers joined the protests. When union leaders began to fear what was happening, they pushed the workers to return to work, thereby bringing the workers’ strikes to an end.
4. Matt. 24:38; Luke 17:27.
5. Matt. 24:39; Luke 17:26.
6. John 15:1.
7. Gen. 1:26, 27.
8. Prov. 23:7.
9. Rom. 7:19.
10. II Sam. 7:5-7.
11. Rev. 21:4.
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