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The symmetry inherent within the universe indicates to the seeking heart how carefully God has wrought, producing miracle after miracle, not only in manifest form but also in the unmanifest and the formless. Yet seldom in a lifetime do men touch upon the vastness of their own cosmic potential. It is essential, therefore, in the name of universal progress, that each man begin the realization of the magnificent miracle of Life which he holds within himself. With this goal in mind, we dedicate the instruction in this Pearl of Wisdom to all who hold dear the progressive revelations of The Brotherhood.
In a vital sense man can be compared to a flame - a moving flame that dances with progress. The energies of man that proceed from the flame are electrical. And the electricity of which I speak is a vital manifestation, both governing thought and being governed by thought. Those who would exercise greater self-control and greater control over their sense of the beautiful must first exercise dominion over the flame and all that comes forth from it. Then they will automatically have that faith in the beauties of both man and nature which is essential to the attainment of God-control over oneself and one's environment.
Some consider beauty to be sameness. Others see the great variety of expression that can be achieved within the bounds of beauty in the universal order. In reality, a tremendous variegation is possible as man expands his awareness of beauty. God has given to man a reasonable license in his exercise of the sense of the beautiful, expecting him to show a marked restraint when experimenting with new patterns, forms, and colors. He has also placed within his soul a mystical sense of the beautiful that allows him free range of thought and feeling to tune in with the grace of God's beauty available through his own inner awareness of the infinite beauties of macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds.
The spirit of competition, although considered by mankind to be the necessary stimulus of excellence, also poses certain problems. Men feel confined within the ranges of their thoughts. In seeking freedom from these confines, they enter into competition with each other; and in their attempts to outdo one another, they shut off, by the damper of selfishness, the interplay of the sacred flames of God that show forth the intricate beauties of His Diamond Shining Mind.
Those who would draw forth from that Mind the magnificent ideational patterns contained within the Alpha and Omega spirals require the freedom of expression enjoyed by a Cosmic Master, whose discipline in the Law, free from the competitive sense, would never allow him to go beyond the cosmic geometry to bring forth a masterpiece simply for the purpose of outdoing another Cosmic Master. Such a one seeks to complement his brother's achievements born out of his communion with Life. The thought of bettering his effort does not occur to him, for he knows that both are tapping the same Source and have equal opportunity to realize an angle new or old of the symmetry of Life. He is not ashamed to reproduce the qualities of sameness that carry the theme of the universal design; for he recognizes his opportunity to contribute various techniques that will enhance the same qualities which others have chosen to enhance with their techniques.
How tragic it is that men spend lifetime after lifetime playing their competitive games, deriving temporary satisfaction in topping one another's achievements instead of simply enjoying the abundant Life and the limitless sense that wells up from within the childlike heart - the sense that comes from the natural expression of the thoughts of God that unfold within the mind attuned to the Infinite.
Just as a flower joyously opens its petals according to its own preordained pattern, so man can release the energies of his consciousness into the blueprint of identity that marks the perfect concept and the patterned destiny - his very own from the beginning. Just as the etheric pattern of the flower is there - an electrical forcefield surrounding the bud with an aura of expectancy - so the design God has willed for each manifestation of Himself surrounds the evolving monad as a cocoon of Light, containing within itself all that man requires to fulfill his divine plan. As the flower unfolds, it follows the outline of the pattern which Nature has lovingly pressed upon its cellular structure. No resistance to the cosmic flow is here, but movement toward reunion with the Whole and a momentum of aeons, of Life evolving Life, begetting beauty and expanding the universal order. Thus Nature teaches man the Way; and if he would follow, his life, too, would be the outpicturing on earth of heaven's immortal loveliness.
The question of selecting a medium to express one's art is easily resolved when one recognizes that there is a pattern basic and unique to every thing, to every idea, to every desire. The very desire to express, inherent within every form of Life, creates and evolves its own progressive pattern which goes before it, providing the forcefield for its unfoldment. Naturalness in living - a quality which some seem to enjoy to the fullest and others, wrapped up as they are in an artificial existence, fail utterly to comprehend - is a state of nonresistance to the soul patterns inherent in man and nature. Naturalness in living, as a quality of freedom, is also a quality of beauty. But let men not confuse what we term the natural with the base elements of man's nature; for these are unnatural, whereas all that is pure and lovely, all that is of the Christ in man, is truly natural because it is the true nature with which he was endowed by God.
In the past as well as in the present, too many artists have felt compelled to use garish colors because these attract the attention of lifestreams whose lack of spiritual evolution causes them to have an affinity for the lower vibrations to which such colors correspond. But if the artist is true to his art, he will not display his work for the approval of the lower nature in man, but for the higher. He will strive to raise man from levels of mediocrity to a superior appreciation of Life. As the consciousness becomes more and more refined, the soul's appreciation of the qualities of the etheric plane are transferred to the outer consciousness, and man finds himself enjoying the more subtle expressions of light and color - the pastel hues and delicate shadings of sunlight as it plays upon Nature in all her glory.
Just as people point to the never-ending chain of cause and effect sequences in the riddle "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" so we would point to the mutuality of influence that exists between a man and his art; just as cultural levels are influenced by society, so society is influenced by its culture. Just as a refined consciousness is aware of refined beauty, so those who are surrounded by the refinements of true culture tend to gain a refinement of consciousness. Until man refines the matrices of his consciousness at both conscious and subconscious levels, and until he gains mastery of the flow of thought and feeling ideations through the nexus of consciousness, he will inadvertently create discordantly.
The act of consciously creating after the patterns of things in the heavens1 enables man to relate his consciousness with the Higher Mind. Thus he initiates a cause-effect sequence whereby he is influenced by the perfection of the creation even as he creates perfection in his art. This is the purpose of mandalas - geometric forms and designs used in meditation2 - to draw the consciousness of man into the symmetry of the Christ Mind, that he might manifest that symmetry first in his form and consciousness and then in all his endeavors. Long ago Saint Paul spoke of this ritual of congruency as the girding-up of the loins of the mind.3
The rapport with nature which man establishes in his being and consciousness, his engrossment with the realm of material manifestation, and his perfecting of the technique of precipitation from Spirit to Matter are intended to draw him back to the realm of Spirit, the plane of First Cause. Here he contacts the fires of creation which imbue his mind with a higher inspiration; indeed, he is at the Source, and all that he wills into manifestation will bear the mark of perfection. As he makes a habit of going to the God Presence for the outline of his work, he finds evolving in his consciousness the magnitude of the Father's love as his own creative potential. This is the gift of freedom the Lord of Creation intends all of his sons and daughters to have, that they might go forth to create, worlds without end, joyously, magnificently, after the patterns which God Himself employed.
It must be remembered that man's native drives to be and to create are originally derived from God - no matter how far they have departed from their pristine purity, muddied though they may be by the spatterings of darkness which have afflicted the race. Those who allow themselves to continue working from a false premise in the fields of art, music, and drama, or any area of creativity, thinking they can move from the base levels of the human consciousness to a progressive achievement of a "new art," may find, upon contacting the teachings of the Ascended Masters which set forth the standard of perfection in every area of living, that the foundation of their experiments and the structure of their work based in imperfect matrices needs to be swept aside.
Saint Paul referred to this as the trial by fire. He said: "Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire."4
We submit all things to the judgment of the Law. We place the harvest of mankind's achievements upon the foundation of the living Word in order that what is made of straw might be consumed by the Sacred Fire. Even in the realm of spiritual art, where man is consciously working to externalize a facet of the cosmic design, unless he involves his consciousness in the universal spirals of creation, he may find himself stopped short of the desired goal and required by natural law to retrace his steps, to undo that which is imperfect, and to begin again with the original design.
At first this may seem to him to be a suffering of great loss. Do not his goodwill and his effort merit recognition even if his work is found wanting? He would almost rather continue as he is - so great is the momentum required to reverse his course - even though he knows his labor is in vain. But very soon he realizes that to continue upon his present course would deprive him of the opportunity for right action in all his endeavors - and still he would ultimately have to return to the original patterns. Wherefore he feels a great need to enter in spirit into the original creation that he might drink deeply of the thoughts of the Mind of God by which He framed the worlds.5
In the arts, as in every walk of life, it is sometimes necessary for individuals to take a seemingly backward step in order that a greater forward step might be taken. We cannot espouse those movements in art and literature, such as surrealism, which draw their form and content from the realm of the subconscious, unless that subconscious be sanctified by the Holy Ghost. We must advocate simplicity in design, pure geometric forms, and the depicting of those ideal qualities and images which originate in the Superconscious, or Christ, Mind. We recognize what we would call an expansion for living, through an expansion of Life, to be the purpose of all art. For art, to be worthy of the name, must raise the consciousness of a people into a higher understanding of the Life that is real - Life as God knows it and not as man has distorted it.
Remember, beloved hearts of Light - all who would create, all who would bring forth design in any field - that your work is the work of God and that you must strive to ensoul it with patterns that have a peaceful and benign effect upon the beholder. The statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder6 ought not to be forgotten. Therefore, if you desire to express beauty for others, to capture on canvas, in a poem, or in a musical composition some hieroglyph of cosmic worth, that those who behold your work may see beyond the physical into a realm of beauty not known before, you yourself must seek to embody in greater measure the divine ideals.
Seldom do those in the field of art realize the enormous effect that they exert upon their society by reason of the patterns of their own life which carry forth into their art. For the life, the thoughts, the feelings, and the concepts that the individual has are an art in themselves. And a man's total personality is reflected in his work, which then becomes the expression of the inward art which he is. Thus through art, when it is used for the communication of noble ideas, as God intended, the forcefield of human thought becomes tethered to the divine.
The bounties of God's eternal grace are to be found everywhere; these are worthy to be preserved not in one, but in many art forms. Knowing this, artists and artisans ought to seek the Holy Spirit and the patterns thereof as a means of ensouling their work with the essence of the heavenly matrix and the power of the Sacred Word. Thus men will learn to transfer to their lives, as they have in their art, the expressions of a higher and more permanent beauty. And they will understand how to fashion their art of living after their art, even as their philosophy of living has shaped the media of their art. For in both they will have acquired the discipline of preserving only those precepts which are worthy to endure.
All intricacy of artistic expression is based upon the progressive reason of God, from the simplest to the most profound logic of the Word. The interaction of the deeper mysteries may then engage more of man's energies and being than he at first feels capable of. But as he moves through the divine art upward into the domain of cosmic reason - all his fears left behind, the dark elements of his world forsaken - he develops the confidence of a tightrope walker in a circus. Totally dependent upon the grace of God to secure the skills he has mastered, he knows that if he obeys the laws of the universe, by His mercy he shall proceed safely from chaos to order to accomplish a great and noble work for God and man. With this confidence, a sacred trust born of his friendship with the Lord of Life, and with faith in the nobility God has placed within his soul, he is able to fabricate according to the divine design.
The works which I accomplished during my embodiment as Paolo Veronese7 were the manifestation of my absolute faith in God's ability to perform through me whatsoever He desired. It is this essential faith which each man or woman who espouses the noble cause of enrichening the quality of life upon the planetary body must have in order to sustain the necessary matrix for the completion of his work.
It has been my experience that to be successful as an artist in the service of the Christ, one must imbue the figures and forms which he portrays on canvas with the qualities of faith, hope, and charity that quicken in all who see them the response that lifts the heart and propels it into spiritual dimensions. I would say that one must also endow his creation with his own momentum of creativity and that unless he espouse the cause of ennobling the souls of others as a part of his creative endeavor, he is not fulfilling his raison d'être.
Whatever the artist desires to communicate must be infused within his work at the time of its creation, for it is not possible to do so at a later date. If at that moment his thoughts and feelings are chaotic, his work will also be chaotic; if they are harmonious, his work will also be harmonious. Likewise, he who would perfect the technique of recording in Matter-form the ideas of God and man, of "making art" as we might say, should realize that he can never communicate to form and substance that which he has not first experienced within himself. Only by reaching up into a realm higher than himself, into the dwelling place of the angelic hosts, into the habitation of the Most High God, only by penetrating Cosmos and gaining proximity to those who have approximated the Consciousness of God, can the artist convey to others through his work the divine experience. This is what I would term the religio art experience, whereby all who look upon his work, no matter what their conviction, have a religious experience, a communion with an aspect of Being that is beyond themselves, an aspect which they would not contact under ordinary circumstances.
Thus the true work of art can be nothing more or less than a catalyst whereby the human transcends itself and becomes one with the Divine. The true work of art must convey a universal principle through the presentation of a personal and particular aspect of Life. It must take the individual from the specific to the general, from the personal to the impersonal, without binding his consciousness to doctrine or dogma, without confining his soul to planes of consciousness not native to its own. The true work of art has many meanings for people of diverse backgrounds; allowing for the confluence of multifaceted ideas through the one Mind, it serves to integrate humanity into the Body of God, captivating souls at various points of the upward-moving spiral, the great godward cycle of individual initiation and fulfillment.
Each individual aspect of the grand mural of Life can also be tested according to these criteria so that every man and woman might know if his life is an outpicturing of the divine art. For although all men are not artists in the usual sense of the word, they are apprentices of the Master Artist, commissioned by the Lord God Himself to practice the divine art of refining their nature, their thoughts, their feelings, and their entire being, that they might make a unique contribution to the mural of Life. One might say that they become less and less of their former selves and more and more of the Greater Self they seek to be as they accept the role of being a contributing artist of the divine panorama and as they recognize that it is the acts of God through man, the works of art wrought by His Hand through the hands of man, that communicate the higher Life to all.
To follow the Christ in the regeneration, to follow His Star to the Throne of God, to be raised from the dead - these goals, set before man as hurdles of the Great Law, are the divine stimulus of excellence. In striving to attain them we are reminded of the strivings of others on the Path, such as Paul, who said, "I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."8
Thus men must think and feel, know and be, and see and manifest that aspect of God's Consciousness which desires to communicate unto them newness of Life. For the divine art is waiting to be born in every man; the spirals of regeneration press upon his mind and heart, exacting the excellent manifestation of God in man. Man seeks to be a chalice. He already has a chalice - the chalice of his consciousness. True it is that the consciousness is in the formative state; and this is precisely the challenge of Life, the challenge of being an artist of the Spirit: the perfecting of the chalice through the mastering of the divine art.
There is an ongoingness about the divine art; there is a sense of progressive fulfillment that seizes the consciousness of the one who seizes it. Those who fail to apprehend the purpose of Life as an opportunity to engage their total being in the flow of the divine art soon lose that sense, and their creative faculties become stultified; thus man himself, by his failure to enter into the cosmic flow, stalls his own progress and stills the natural and progressive movement of the soul.
There are times when, by reason of an inner prompting, man engages in the necessary act of retrospection and introspection, when he ponders that which has transpired in his life - his losses and his gains, his forward and backward movements, his past and present levels of attainment, and just what he is and where he is as opposed to what and where he would like to be. By so doing man can assess his rate of progress and take steps to counteract all that detracts from his pursuit of primary goals. Not as a continuing process, but as a periodic self-evaluation, this examining of one's motives and acts, past and present, can be extremely useful as the disciple prepares himself for the progressive cycles of initiation which, sooner or later, come to everyone on the Path.
The transition of man from the spiritually inactive to the spiritually active state should be automated under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When the pillar of fire or pillar of cloud9 begins its forward movement before his consciousness by night or by day, man must be ready to follow. It does not matter what the world thinks; to the soul in pursuit of spiritual Reality, human opinion is of no consequence. His constant prayer is "Lead me from the unreal to the Real! Lead me from darkness to Light! Lead me from death to immortality!"10 And always it is God who leads and man who follows.
It is the education of the young that I would speak of - not of the young in body, but of the young in heart and of the young in spirit. For they recognize that the Lord of Creation has appointed Elder Bards of cosmic art to preside over the universal order and that, as Master Artists, they are eager and willing, under divine direction, to teach mankind how to realize their cosmic potential and to bequeath to them their own momentums of cosmic achievement.
Neither I nor any other Ascended Master has ever found fault with man's adoration of the Christ, whether this be of the Universal Christ or of Christ Jesus born in Bethlehem long ago. In his own expression of the depth, the height, and the riches of God, Jesus has said again and again, both to us and to his embodied disciples, "It behooves every man who would pursue the divine art to summon the original creative power which 'before Abraham was - I AM,'11 the creative wisdom and the creative love which were inherent within the Mind of the Creator before form was."
Just as the Universal Christ is in us all, in every Master, in every angel and the blessed elementals who sustain the petals of a rose and the boughs of the pines in the forest, so Light and Life and Intelligence pervade all substance. Man should seek to communicate with these aspects of God's Consciousness with which He has endowed both the spiritual and the material creation. For even that which appears to be inert matter is imbued with the universal Christ Consciousness.
In accepting the form consciousness of the Master of Love who walked the shores of Galilee two thousand years ago, man often neglects to realize the imbuement by the Lord of heaven and earth12 of the entire creation with Light and its manifold reflections. But through the initiations leading to God-mastery, man discovers the penetrability of all substance and being by the Universal God, by the Universal Christ, by the person of the Christ in Jesus or in any man. For to be a joint heir with Him13 means to be one with Him in thought, in word, and in deed.
The divine art is dynamic beyond the ken of mortal thought. Through the outreach of his consciousness, man comes to definite conclusions regarding his place in the great cosmic flow. Thus he achieves an ongoing expression of the divine symmetry; for art, both material and spiritual, is eternally progressive.