Today I would like to say a few words to you about the teaching handed down in the esoteric tradition concerning the first day of the New Year. And as the only kind of knowledge that really interests me is that which can be immediately useful, you can apply what I shall tell you to your own everyday lives.
Most people celebrate New Year’s Day in night clubs, bars and dance-halls. They express their joy at the coming of the New Year by having parties and amusing themselves and indulging in all kinds of follies. And then they fritter away the rest of the year in unconsciousness and futility and, as unconsciousness always leads to tribulations, it is not long before the tribulations begin! It is quite senseless to start off the New Year in this way; it shows that they who do so have no inkling of the spiritual and magical aspect of things. But this is the aspect which interests me.
The Cabbalah teaches that each day is a living, sentient being which bears the record of all our physical and psychic acts. You might say that the 365 days of the year are like a magnetic tape on which each day, with all that it has brought of good and evil, happiness and unhappiness, is recorded. Each separate year of our lives is like a separate tape recording.
The New Year is new and yet, at the same time, it is already old, aged by all that each one of us has already gone through in our lives. The new year is like the pure water of a mountain stream as it mingles with the stagnant waters of the lowlands; it is new and yet it is not altogether new because it is lived by men who are burdened by their past. This is why, although all is new, men never manage to live an entirely new life. The New Year is a spotless virgin, but who knows what shady resorts it will get into or what kind of company it will keep. The past, by which I mean all the states a man has known and all the events that have marked his life, is recorded and engraved within him, and it takes a great deal of knowledge, patience and determination to erase these imprints and free oneself from the stereotypes of the past: it is an extremely difficult task. But when I talk of the past I am not talking only of the past of this incarnation, of the days and years we have lived in our present lives. I am also talking of other, previous incarnations, for we bear with us the traces of both our immediate and our distant pasts. Only the Initiates know how to cleanse themselves of the stains of the past; other men do not even realize that there is work to be done in order to save the ever-new present from contamination by all that is old, worn-out and moldy. The question, you see, is not quite as simple as it would seem at first sight!
Unfortunately, most people have no idea that there is anything here to study, understand and transform: they look forward to each new year in the fond hope that it will, at last, see the fulfillment of all their dearest wishes: the winning ticket in the sweepstakes, marriage with Prince Charming, a fabulous legacy from their grandmother or their rich uncle in America! Others spend their days and nights looking for buried treasure in caves or at the bottom of the sea. People always want to live in an illusory world. They think, “The new year will bring this, that or the other….” And then they sit and wait. But the year passes just like all the others – and sometimes worse than the others. They sow no seed and then they expect something to grow! No, nothing has ever grown in these conditions. If you sow some seed you have the right to look forward to harvesting the fruit, but not otherwise.
Have you worked? Have you ploughed your soil, the soil of your own being? Have you sown and planted something within yourself? If so, then you can look forward to joy, happiness and peace in the New Year; in fact even if you are not expecting them they will come. But if you have never planted anything and, in spite of that, you entertain high hopes – well, they are hopeless hopes, I can tell you, for they have no foundation in natural law.
The New Year is not completely separate from the old; the relationship may not be direct but it is always there, at least indirectly. The New Year, just because it is new, seems to be as pure and unspoiled as a newborn baby who is always considered so pure and innocent. Yes, it seems like that on the surface, but even a newborn baby has ties to its parents, grandparents and great grandparents, to society and to the spirit of the age. It bears with it the imprints of its past lives and, in one way or another, all that will eventually come to the surface. The New Year is a virgin, pure and innocent; it is cut out of immaculate white cloth, but as soon as it makes contact with man, its whiteness becomes tinged with colour, just as the pure, crystal-clear rain from heaven is coloured by the soil through which it flows when it reaches the earth.
The year that we call “new”, therefore, is old from the very beginning because the human beings it encounters are old in their way of thinking and feeling and all their habits. They have never thought to wash out their vessels, jugs or saucepans, before filling them with the pure waters of The New Year. And yet, isn’t this the first thing we learn in our own kitchens: before pouring clean water into a container, we have to wash it and sometimes even to scour it thoroughly, otherwise the clean water will be dirtied by the container – even a child knows that! But when it comes to filling their hearts and souls and minds with pure water, men never think of cleansing themselves first. Although they apply this lesson every day in their kitchens, when it comes to their own inner lives it is as though they had never known it; they forget that they have to apply the same rules to themselves and discard all that is soiled and grimy and retain only what is pure. Innumerable details in our daily lives can help us to understand this truth: in our houses, for instance, we treasure paintings, beautiful furniture or valuable jewelry for years, sometimes for centuries, but we soon get rid of things that have no value; or again, we keep cut flowers in a vase for three or four days, but then we have to throw them away and get fresh ones. And yet men think they can keep all kinds of old, dirty, rotting things within themselves!
Yes, we must understand the new year better; we must go out to meet it in the deep conviction that it is a highly gifted living being and that it brings us valuable presents; we must learn to prepare a lot of space within ourselves so as to be able to receive this abundance of gifts; we must continually sweep out all the old junk that litters our hearts and minds, and make room for the new year even before it comes.
The Cabbalah also tells us that The New Year is influenced by the stars. The birth of a new year is like the birth of a child: it is the beginning of a life that will last just twelve months. When a child is born, one can draw up a horoscope based on the date and time of birth and thus foresee the principal events of the child’s life. And we can do the same for the birth of a new year; in fact you should know that the first day of the year determines the first month, the second day – the second month, the third day – the third month and so on. So you must try to live, think, feel and behave as well as possible, at least during the first twelve days, so as to ensure an intelligent, luminous start to the year and thus influence and determine it favorably.Some of you may say….”I did my best during the first twelve days, but the rest of the year wasn’t at all good!” That is because you allowed it to be influenced by the old things of the past. You have to clean, sweep, wash and purify everything in you. But no one does it. No one even thinks of doing it. Of course, it is impossible to clean everything all in one day; the weight of the past still influences us and the New Year will always be mingled with the old. You would have to be a divinity to improve things one hundred percent. To improve the situation by twenty, thirty or fifty percent would already be quite an achievement for a disciple!
If you want to draw up the horoscope of what the year holds for you, you should not base your calculations on the date at midnight. In spite of the differences of longitude and latitude, this would give you a collective horoscope for the whole of mankind which would not correspond to the events which may arise in the life of a particular individual. Of course, one could compare this collective horoscope with one’s own birth-chart so as to foresee or explain events, but if you want to establish a horoscope for someone in particular, you should base your calculations on them the moment when he begins to manifest himself. This is the time of birth on the first day of the year. If someone wakes up at eleven in the morning, then you must draw up his horoscope for eleven o’clock, for that is when he begins to get up and shout at his wife “where are my socks? Where’s my clean shirt? What have you done with my cuff links?” (Oh, those cuff links: they are always lost!) Yes, a man’s life is determined by the way in which he begins his first day of the year when he wakes up.
For us, as a community, our year begins as we gather to pray and sing together, and for the rest of the day you must put a guard on your thoughts and, above all, on your words: if your tongue is just itching to say something it shouldn’t, go into a corner by yourself, say a few words to relieve the itch and then go back and join the others with a smile on your face! Tomorrow you will have to continue to be careful so as to prepare good conditions for the second month, and so on. To be sure, even if you are very careful, the year will not necessarily be absolutely faultless, for as I have said, the present is linked to the past, and the past includes not only all one’s previous years but all one’s previous lives as well. If you owe someone money, for instance, he is liable to come and ask you for it on the first day of the year; he will not wait for the year to go by – he might well come today. And if you have enemies on the astral plane they will not necessarily wait until after the First of January to come and torment you. How can you get rid of these inner enemies? The question is of great importance; you must know that man does have inner enemies, in fact they are the worst kind. But even if you are not wholly successful, at least you will find what I have told you useful because it will enable you to improve your situation, and, above all, to prevent it from getting any worse. So let us stand now and begin our prayers as usual. In this way we shall be inscribing this first day of 1963 in the Akashic Records by living it in pray, adoration, love and song. “May the merciful and compassionate Lord look with favor on the Brotherhood, May He allow it to grow and flourish and project lights into the whole world so that His Kingdom may come as soon as possible on earth, and peace and harmony reign, at last, amongst men!”
Even if most people are too absorbed in their work or too busy amusing themselves in night clubs to think or wish or ask for the coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth, let there be at least a few who clamor for it!
So, let this be your work in the year ahead: start by fixing your sights on that ideal, that sublime goal: the Kingdom of God and His Justice on Earth. Secondly, be conscious and attentive and watch yourself to see whether you are coming closer or moving away from your ideal. And finally, a third point which is implicit in the others: devote all your energies and strength and all your capacities to accomplishing this task. In this way, your Will, Heart and Mind will all pull together in the same direction: the Mind remains perceptive, enlightened, attentive, watchful and lucid; the Heart feeds your high ideal, it longs for it and loves it and is constantly in touch with it. And the Will works to serve both the Heart which is yearning for the highest good and the Mind which acts as guide, advisor and instructor to guard, enlighten and steer a straight course. In these conditions, whatever obstacles and difficulties are strewn along the way, the spirit of man will always triumph; sooner or later it will be victorious, for these three primordial faculties have extremely powerful resources available to them of which we know nothing.
If you are not getting the results you hoped for it is because you have not yet fully committed these three faculties; you have not yet yoked them together in harmony. Each one works, but each works for its own interests, unrelated to and out of step with the others. The Intellect has, perhaps, understood how glorious it is to climb to the heights and reach the peaks, to melt into one with its Creator, but the Heart, in the meantime, has its own preferences and they may lead in a totally different direction. In this case you must try to bring your Heart into line and guide it in the right direction. It is possible to persuade your Heart to desire that which your Intellect sees to be right, wise and useful, and it is possible, also, to induce your Will to act in order to achieve it. But most people do not even realize that these contradictions, these inner rifts and conflicts exist or, if they do, they think that they are inevitable and have no idea what causes them. They have no guide to advise them and tell them how to unify their three powers: Intellect, Heart and Will, and steer them all in the same direction.
In point of fact, man is capable of overcoming all his inner conflicts and divisions if he has a divine ideal and clings to it come what may. If he nourishes and cherishes a sublime ideal, it will incarnate and materialize within him and take possession of him until it fills his whole being and he becomes his ideal. People without an ideal fritter away their energies and waste their lives.
The sad thing is that this formidable alliance, this undivided union of Heart, Mind and Will in pursuit of an ideal is found most frequently in criminals. Without realizing it they succeed, like the Initiates, in combining these three faculties, the difference being that their goal is to kill, steal and destroy. And between these two classes of men (criminals and Initiates), there is the multitude of those who have no fixed goal, in whom the three faculties are divided or at war with each other.
In St. John’s Revelation, we read “I could wish you were cold or hot. So, then, because you are luke warm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” Behind these words lies a profound science. “I could wish you were cold or hot” means that one must be for good or for evil but not indifferent, undecided; it means that our Intellect, Heart and Will must combine to achieve something, no matter what, together. Heaven has no love for criminals, but at least they are strong, determined and capable, and Heaven values these qualities. So even if their present actions are evil, Heavenly entities keep an eye on them and plan to catch them unaware one day! They think to themselves, “One little spoke in your wheel, my lads, and before you know it you will be heading the other way! Your long experience in working with the combined forces of your Hearts, Wills and Minds means that you will be valuable workers for us’. All the ardor, all the assertiveness and determination, all the strength of Will that criminals use to steal, destroy and kill, will, one day, be at the service of good. Whereas the feeble ones who can never make up their minds may not actually do evil, perhaps, but they are equally incapable of doing good, and the Heavenly entities scratch their heads in perplexity, wondering what on earth they can use them for. Their inner faculties are in a state of disarray; they have no strong convictions; they are easily influenced – so easily, in fact, that they can often be recruited by the Black Lodge! People like this are dangerous, therefore, and that is why they will be spewed out, that is to say, rejected.
If some people never achieve anything worthwhile, either in their inner self or in the world around them, it is because their faculties of Mind, Heart and Will are disunited. What happens in a family when the father pursues one goal, the mother another and the children all go their separate ways, each with their own goals? The family falls apart, of course, and that is exactly what happens to man’s inner family: the father – the Intellect, has his own pet hobby; the mother has hers and it is not the same as the father’s and the children, that is…the Will, are left rudderless and are always getting into mischief.
You are here, in an Initiatic school, in order to learn quantities of truths which are new to you and which will enable you to straighten out your lives, to renew and organize them and set them on a path towards a heavenly goal. Try it! Restore order within yourselves; yoke the forces of your Intellect, Heart and Will together and steer them towards one goal: the accomplishment of the Will of God. You will soon see how your life changes. To be sure, you will not be immune to the buffeting of strong winds and earth tremors: as long as you are on earth you are bound to experience some unpleasant shocks, but they will pass far more quickly than before and will not leave the same scars behind them. Your houses will stand firm because they will be built of more resilient materials, whereas previously, they were liable to crumble at the greatest shock.
I am not going to make you all kinds of spectacular promises; I am not saying that if you enter into this Teaching you will receive wealth and fame and become the friend of princes. The only thing I am saying is that if you succeed in aiming your Intellect, Heart and Will towards one and the same goal, a change will take place in your consciousness. To begin with, the change will be so small as to be invisible but it will contain all Heaven and earth. Remember what Jesus said about the mustard seed, “which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.” So it is not the size of the seed that counts but its vigor. You can think of the mustard seed as a thought or a feeling: to begin with it is imperceptible, but if it is intense and if it is given favorable conditions, it has the potential to produce fantastic results. “The birds of the air come and nest in its branches” said Jesus, and the “birds” are the spirits of the Invisible World who will come to you and even make their dwelling within you.
I am not making you any great promises, therefore, I am simply saying that if you understand me aright, if you give a loving welcome to the tiny promise I have made today, if you tend it and nourish it with care, it will grow into a great tree in which even the angels will take shelter. The seed I am sowing in you today is the idea that you must unify your three faculties: Intellect, Heart and Will, and direct them all towards the same goal, for this is the only way to achieve anything worthwhile. As these faculties are all of divine origin, they all contain untold treasures, and as soon as their forces are combined and set on the path to Heaven there is a constant flow of communication between them and Heaven. When the Intellect is rooted in the soil of Heaven, the Light which illuminates it becomes brighter still and it receives a ceaseless flow of inspirations and revelations. When the heart remains closely bound to its roots in Heaven, it slakes its thirst on love and the elixir of everlasting life; it lives in a constant state of wonder and ecstasy and becomes as vast as the Universe itself. And the Will, when it is kept fit and takes a lot of exercise, becomes so powerful that it overcomes all obstacles: when the Will is one with Heaven, it can become as powerful as God himself.
The saying goes that strength lies in unity but so far this has been understood only in the social, political or military spheres: men united to destroy their enemies or to build, but it was always an external union. From now on unity must apply to the internal sphere. We must be united by our ideal, by a Divine idea, by our brotherly love; we must be united in the work we are doing for the coming of the Kingdom of God. If this is what unites us, then….Yes, in that kind of unity lies the most formidable strength. External unity is not bad but it is insufficient. People join forces for a time and then their association is dissolved again and they all go their separate ways. But the union I am talking about, the union which makes for true strength, lasts eternally. When you join forces with the angels, with Heaven and with your own higher Self, it is not for a day or two, or even for a few years; you don’t embark on this kind of union in order to reach a short-term goal after which you fall back into ignorance and darkness. No, this union is forever, it is eternal. It is very important that you understand this.
Today is the first day of the year and for these first twelve days, at least, you must be on your guard and watch your words, feelings and acts and see that they are always in harmony with the Kingdom of God and Universal Brotherhood. To be sure, this is very difficult because all kinds of unforeseen circumstances and events arise, but if your conscience is on the alert to adjust your aim and remedy any little thing that goes wrong, then you will accomplish a glorious, Divine work. It is quite possible that you may be tempted and put to the test, that during these twelve days some very inferior entities may try to seduce you. This is something you have to expect: I cannot promise you that it will all be easy either for you or for me, but at least, if we are together, strongly united, we can all help each other. It is the bond that unites us which is important and, above all, the bond that unites our Heart, Intellect and Will within us.
One day when you are given the opportunity to look back over the events of your past, you will be obliged to recognize that the most important and precious moments of your life were those spent with the Brotherhood in meditation, song and prayer. At present you cannot see that, you don’t know it, but one day you will see things more clearly and then you will understand the magnitude of the work we are doing together, and exclaim “The Lord be blessed and praised for permitting me to have a share in such glorious work!” When you are shown the results of this work and all the marvels that it has accomplished throughout the world, you will be dazzled and amazed, for the work I am asking you to take part in has already been initiated on high by the Angels and Divinities, and our part is simply to open a few little doors here, on Earth, so that their Divine work may also bear fruit on the physical plane.
I can see that you are longing for me to tell you more! Aren’t you tired already? It is extraordinary: we’ve been together for about ten hours since this morning. You are becoming tireless!
Nowadays there are more and more people who are always tired. Why is this? Because their bodies are overloaded with impurities that they have accumulated through their food and drink and the polluted air, but also because of the unclean thoughts and feelings they indulge in. It is extremely important to understand the importance of purity on all the different planes. If a man succeeds in introducing purity into every one of his cells he becomes absolutely tireless; he becomes immortal! Yes, death recoils from him; it has no hold on one who is absolutely pure. This explains how certain human beings in the past lived for hundreds of years. You will probably think that this is not possible, but it is: the human body is built to last for thousands of years and if, in our day, men do not live long it is due to the way in which they live.
Certain folk traditions speak of three goddesses who presided over human destinies and who gathered round a child as it was born. In Greek mythology there are the Moirai or Fates; in other countries they are fairies, and it was they who decided how long a child would live and what his weak points and his strengths would be. In reality, of course, fairies do not exist and our fate is determined by the good or evil we have done in our past incarnations. You will ask, “How is it determined?” It is done automatically. Yes, there are automatic slot machines: depending on the lives he has lived in the past, a person has to be born into a particular family in a particular time and place, and all this has to correspond exactly to what it is he has to achieve in this incarnation. Everything is put in place automatically so that he shall be in a position to fulfill his destiny. If you go to a food shop and buy fruit, cheese and sugar, a machine calculates how much you owe. If you put a coin into a vending machine, out tumbles a sandwich, or some sweets or some postage stamps! If human beings are clever enough to invent automatic vending machines don’t you think the Invisible World is perfectly capable of doing so too? Up there everything is filed, classified and highly organized: no one needs to bother their heads about it.
So we need no Fates or fairies to decide our destinies for us. This was simply the colorful means the Initiates of the past used to bring home to people the fact that everything was already determined when they were born. Yes, this is the all-important truth: everything in our lives is determined by our previous lives. How is this done? Within each one of us is a computer which keeps everything we do in memory: whether our lives are good or evil, whether we respect or transgress the laws of God, and so on. Yes, there are machines to take care of all that, and when the time comes for someone to be classified, his computer simply indicates a name and according to that name he is set on his own particular course.
Nature has placed these computers inside each one of us: they record all we do, analyze and sum it all up and draw their conclusions about us. And this is how we are determined: by ourselves. No one else has the right to determine our fate; otherwise there would be room for prejudice and injustice. The way of absolute justice is to be judged by oneself, that is, by what we are inwardly, for we are the only ones who know all the details of our motives and intentions. No one else can ever know it all. So, be sure of this: it is you yourself who will be your own judge one day. The Lord has equipped you so perfectly with all you need that there is no danger of your making a mistake.
When astronomers and mathematicians have some extremely complicated mathematical problem to solve which would take them days and weeks, they feed all their data into a computer and the answer comes back to them in a few seconds. And for man the same pattern applies: all the elements of his problem are entered into the computer and when it has completed its calculations it displays a name which sums up exactly what that man is and automatically determines the conditions of his next incarnation. Now, when I use the expression automatically, I am not saying that all this happens without the intervention of Consciousness or Intelligence. In the Invisible World even the computers are conscious, but in the World Above everything is conscious because everything is alive.
Everything in nature is a receiver or transmitter: all the rocks, stones and sand – if you only knew all the recordings contained in a single grain of sand! Man does not yet know how to decipher all these messages hidden in the stones of the Earth, but the day will come when he will be able to pick up a stone from Egypt, India or even Atlantis (he will have to go and get that one from the bottom of the ocean) and get it to reveal the story of all that it has witnessed throughout the ages. In our day, there is already talk of tuning in to the sounds emitted by the sun and the stars, for the stars and planets all emit sounds, and this is why the Initiates said everything in nature was music that the whole of creation sang. But it is the rocks and stones that can provide most information, because all the rest has disappeared: the plants, animals and men of the past, with all that they had discovered, have all gone; only the rocks and metals remain to bear witness to the history of the world. This is what true archeology should be: to decipher these documents of Nature by tuning in to the sound-waves they produce.
If you play a magnetic tape recording of a symphony on your tape recorder, you will hear the music; but where is the music on that tape? You can weigh it, measure it and examine it under the microscope but you will find no music! It is all contained in the magnetic imprint. And the messages contained in Man are recorded in exactly the same way. This is something you must know, for when you know this you will be obliged to be careful about what you do and to keep improving. Most people think that they can do wrong without anybody being any the wiser, and it is this conviction that they can hide the evil they do from others that prevents them from evolving and improving. To be sure, one can conceal a great many things from other people; but one cannot conceal anything from oneself! Whatever one does or says or thinks, one is always there to witness it. Nature, you know, is extremely clever, and she has placed miniature cameras and recorders in man without his knowing it. The day he realizes that there is no way he can cheat he will become honest – finally and irrevocably honest!
In the past the Initiates could not reveal all this to men, so they used to say, for instance, that the eye of God was always upon us and saw everything we did. The truth is that God has far better things to do than to watch all the crimes and abominations committed on earth. If He had to watch all that He would indeed be the unhappiest of beings! God does not see all that because He does not want to see it. You will perhaps object…..”But doesn’t that mean that God doesn’t know everything?” No, God does, certainly, know everything; but He does not have to watch all that goes on. When He wants to know something He knows it, when He wants to rest, He stops watching and takes the telephone off the hook! If he didn’t do that, can’t you imagine how He would be besieged every day? “Lord, give me money! Lord, get rid of my enemy for me!” and even, “Lord, get rid of my enemy for me! And even, “Lord, make my husband die so that I can marry my Lover!” Yes, that is why – He told me this, one day, in strict confidence – when He wants a little peace he takes his telephone off the hook. You will object that this is in direct contradiction with everything that the Bible tells us about God. Not at all; what is in the Bible is often symbolic,, metaphorical, and we need the Light of Initiation in order to understand the depth of wisdom and science contained in these symbols.
Actually, creation is far better organized than one imagines. God leaves the task of automatically recording everything that happens to all the computers and recorders He has placed throughout Nature. Do you really believe that it is God Himself who watches all our misdeeds, day and night, and notes them all down in a little notebook? And what happens when He has to look for His penknife and sharpen His pencil? Think of all the things He misses and that don’t get written down. No, no! All that is childish nonsense! For an Initiate, God is a Spirit; He is everywhere, but He does not want to see everything because He has commissioned others to see this for Him. When He does want to know anything it is very easy. When the managing director of a business wants information about one of his employees he asks his secretary to look up the man’s personal file, and there he has the information he needs at once. Why should the Lord waste His time watching and making a note of all our crimes? Don’t imagine that; it would be a purely honorific function. What do you think He created all those Angels and Archangels for? So that they would do nothing and leave all the work to Him? No, no. That’s not possible!
It is no longer possible to persuade human beings to live better lives by telling them that God is watching them and will punish them for their crimes. Most people nowadays can think for themselves and they would say, “Don’t be ridiculous; He’s not going to waste His time watching what I do!” and they would just go on committing crimes. But if you tell them that it is all being filmed and recorded inside themselves, and that one day they will be judged on the strength of those recordings then, of course, it becomes a very different matter.
All this that I have been revealing to you today is one of the most important lessons of Initiatic Science. When you know these things you have the magic power to re-create your life and transform your future. If you look into your own archives and see that, in the past, you and lied and calumniated others, that you have been selfish and vicious and that it has all been recorded, you can immediately try to record other, good, noble and luminous things on top of old recordings, and in this way you become creators of your own destiny.
You are perhaps wondering what the recorders we have inside us are like. They are microscopic reels, single atoms. You will say that it is impossible to record everything on one little atom. I don’t agree: don’t you remember how enormous the first radios were? And nowadays they are being made smaller and smaller, the electrical circuits are simply drawn in metallic paint and the current flows along these fine lines. The miniaturization of these appliances is developing so fast that one day, no doubt, we shall have pocket television sets. Well, Nature has outstripped human beings: the spools of her tape recorders are so small that they can all fit into an atom. When a man dies he shows this atom to his judges who project the film of his entire life on a screen. The terrible thing is that the person has to remain there, seated amongst his impassive judges, and watch the whole film, and he sees quantities of things he had forgotten all about.
There are books, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead for example, which tell how a soul comes before the Judges of Hell to hear them pronounce sentence on him. In point of fact the judges do not utter a word, they are completely silent. So who pronounces a man’s sentence? He himself. It is his own judgment that condemns or vindicates him. And he who has lived a truly perfect life simply comes before his judges, saying, “I am pure, I am pure, I am pure with the purity of the Phoenix of Heliopolis.” He is unafraid, he can simply look at them and say, “I am pure” because he has judged himself long since. But others who do not know what they are and have forgotten everything, have to witness the unfolding of their life-story, and in it they find their judgment. Believe me: all this is the unadulterated truth. In any case, one day you will get to know the reality of these impartial observers, these judges who dwell within you. If I have talked to you about them today it is because it is the New Year and I want to remind you to record only positive, luminous thoughts, feelings and actions. Now, at the end of this day together, you are like bees, laden with nectar and you are going to make the most delicious honey out of that nectar for the nourishment and enjoyment of spiritual entities from on high. Yes, all those who know how to make honey for the Lord are bees. And we need bees; they are the only ones who know the rules of the new society, the new Brotherhood. Bees can teach us a great deal. Disciples who work for the Universal White Brotherhood becomes bees and prepare their honey in harmony and purity. A very happy year of Light to you all, my dear brothers and sisters!
Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov Sevres, Paris, January 1, 1963
