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Gracious Lovers of Beauty and Perfection,
The spectacle of art attracts relatively few people because the soul of the artist must enter into the beholder and only the few are capable of making this attunement. Unless this occur, quite naturally men's interpretations often belie the universal message which true art is intended to portray and the real meaning of the work is not appreciated; consequently, it cannot hold the attention of the viewer.
Now the need arises for all men who devote themselves to cosmic principle, who desire to see the salvation of the age rather than its destruction, to consider how they may best serve the Brotherhood. If we are to be honest we will have to admit that the works of most artists in the fields of painting, sculpture, and music are clumsy and coarse by divine standards. Far too many of their creations are framed out of lower astral horror rather than in the joy of the Magnificat.1 We can understand the value of realism to depict the depths of degradation to which civilization has fallen in order to spur noble countermeasures, but we deem many of the outer forms in contemporary vogue to be nothing more than a surrealism of horror and distortion. Yet our critique is not destructive. We warn that we may teach.
The school of reality is the school of cosmic apprehension where one seeks to define the divine rather than merely to mold substance or to control sound. Harmony within the components of a work of art is as important as the harmony of the total work. Sculpture can be frozen harmony and architecture a crescendo of the mind of God. We seek through cosmic impact of pure art forms to rupture mankind's regrettable resistance to spiritual things. The fact that Christianity has failed to exercise the fullness of its mission and, in its detours and circuitous routes, presents the face of deviousness to mankind is no reason for spurning it. Yet, untutored minds and hearts - in the frenzy of rejection and the desire to replace their broken idols - turn unwittingly toward the sordid and the bizarre.
When men are unable to enthrone the Most High within themselves, they enthrone themselves within their concepts of the Most High. Making no pretense at hypocrisy, they surround themselves with it. Call the Divine Creator by any other name than God, he is still the same - the summum bonum of all good manifesting from "the beginning" and shedding light upon his own purposes as well as upon the purposes of mankind. The consciousness of man was originally endowed with the plasticity of harmonic acceptance of each divine matrix or thoughtform. The response was the eclectic magnification of the peaks of joy.
When men lost hope in unseen glories and turned outwardly rather than within to affirm the real, they felt the prick of foreign objects upon the matrix of consciousness. At first this distortion was uncomfortable, but as devious patterns became implanted in consciousness the dutiful faculties of nature quickly molded themselves around them as easily as they had embraced the pristine elements of their divine origin. Thus, through habit, mankind found comfort in the familiar albeit the imperfect world he had superimposed upon his true inheritance. The rebellion of the spirit, then, must be understood as the rejection of the distortions of past-age concepts, the heaving of the soul to shatter the clay mold that encases its identity.
Men should reexamine the fabric of the eternal garment and mend the broken threads, weaving into the robe of life the energy of light wherever darkness doth appear. While the flaws of loomed textiles are not easily mended, men and women working with spiritual substance and cosmic ideas find the natural flow of light able to perfect the seamless garment and to heal all disturbances in the psyche of man.
Men must, of course, recover their faith and refine it in order to draw forth the omnipotent stream that will render their solar bodies2 flawless under the scrutiny of the all-knowing eye of God. But what magnificent potential exists in the consciousness of the individual who considers for the first time that the renovation of his person is a most practical possibility.
Unfortunately, orthodox religion has implanted in mankind's consciousness concepts of vileness and sin to replace the beauty of the lily of his immaculate conception in the mind of God. As miserable sinners, men can only lament their lot, having scarcely any room in their hearts to let the divine appear within.
We do not deny the gross errors that have been committed on a world scale or the personal errors that individuals have perpetrated in their own worlds, often ignorantly and many times with only half knowledge of the consequences of their acts. But no continuing good can come to the advancing soul who seeks to hold the hand of Christ, of light, of creative energy by drawing in past participles of an old grammar. The ever-new Word must impart to man the hope that marches over the obstacles of the past to a new sense of the beautiful.
One of the problems of contemporary men is that they are seldom willing to consider the abandonment of their whole forte of knowledge. They have created a leaning tower of Pisa and they cannot contemplate its ruin. Better far to destruct all of man's wrong matrices at once and to rebuild from the ruins upward than to continue to deal with an unwieldy structure. We do not favor the destruction of individuals or of opportunities but rather the destruction of that which was builded in error.3 Thus we sound a note of warning.
The many benign qualities that were placed with good intention in the construction of the leaning tower can be kept intact and used in the new structure after their purification by cosmic light energy. Fear not, then, to seek to understand the ethereal, to develop a sense of the pastel colors,4 of the gentle colors, of the swirling radiance of a swaddling garment of light. Know, however, that this light that is the light of God that never fails holds within its nature a crystal clarity and spiritual purity that is without alloy.
Aught that depresses, smothers, suppresses, or draws man downward into conflict may well be the psychic dominance of others. In this connection it should be understood that art wrongly used can become a key to Pandora's realm. The opening of that box - that rectangle (in this case "wreck tangle") of distorted consciousness - can never be enlivening toward good. The new sense of cosmic joy, like the sun's radiance upon sparkling waters, speaks of the nature of fluidity in motion, of flow, of regeneration, of vast-domed bubbles shimmering upon a splendid moment with all of the colors of the rainbow.
The age has been dark and heavy, the lives of the saints have been stilted and stultified with mortal concepts, and the shoddy facade of the social world that outwardly seeks to portray great class ever lacks the nature of true grace. As the chohans ponder what impetus can do more for each of our chelas, we seek to portray in this seven weeks of our cosmic effort the thoughts that we feel will most marvelously advance man's consciousness and his adventure in living.
What tremendous import there is in the development of the spiritual senses. The old senses must pass away to give place to the new. Transmutation, transcendence, and transfer all speak of translucence, even of transparency; for the idea of seeing through a glass darkly but then face to face5 is always the miracle of a moment when opacity yields to translucency and translucency to transparency. The thinning of the veil and the clarification of nebulous concepts together with their reduction to orderly simile will provide mankind a golden rule by which he may measure his doings - his goings and his comings - and his progress in a universal sense.
May I say, then, in closing that the media of this age provide new and beautiful avenues for the sensitive artist to externalize - whether in his life or upon canvas - products of new hope as charity to a waiting world where the starry eyes of children beam in the promise of a future that in God's name we must make nobler than the past.
Raise the world to Christ's glory,
Enfold the world with Christ's story,
Reveal the hidden that is within,
Forget the sordid sense of sin,
Forsake the shadow and unreal,
By light's perfection mankind heal,
In cosmic beauty's rainbow seal
The children of good hope.
Lovingly in the beauty of creation, I AM