Letter From A Father Continued

I know, and you know, that the world has produced some strange and unpleasant ways of picturing me and doing me service. There are religions in the world of all sorts and the confusion in your minds about your own reality, the reality of the universe and about the nature of my being is a terrible tangle of fear, doubt and human shortcomings. I would like you to try and raise your eyes above all this towards the one simple and salient fact that my nature is made of a degree of love which will go far beyond any longing you have ever carried in your heart as yet, and, if such was my nature from the beginning, then such will always be the starting point for any understanding that you have of me. If your understanding tries to start from a lesser position, then it will produce for you a lesser vision and one which may well hinder and hurt you if you try to live by it or serve it in ways which would be foreign to my ways.

You often picture me in your hearts as something less than a kind and strong human being, but, if you look at all the fine qualities that the world has witnessed, and then think of me as having them even more abundantly, then you will come closer to my bigness of heart and bigness of mind. Remember, I do not look for reward or praise for my gift to you; I give it with gladness and without thought of you being in any debt to me, but you must realise clearly that the very nature of my gift requires that you must value it and love it as I do, for I too love the qualities that I value, but I do not worship them. I adore what I aspire to.

I am living, which means I have ideal objectives for which I work and to which I aspire. These objectives I love. If I worshipped them I would feel that I had an exaggerated and unbalanced attitude towards them. To love something is one thing, but to worship it is another. Worship creates a gap in our understanding and valuation and into this gap creeps fear and self-deprecation. Neither of these qualities are good in my sight, and I do not desire that you should worship me for it produces servility and fear where I should prefer friendship and affection.

Adoration is an extreme form of affection, and, as such, it is a wholesome thing for it does not destroy the adorer in any way. Hard though some of these words will be to you, it is better that you try to understand them and in so doing understand the one who draws you by the affection he has for all good and beautiful things. Love expresses itself in action and you call this loving service, but, in this context, I do not like the word 'service' for it hides the true meaning of love in action.

Love in action does not consider itself to be service or anything measured in terms of merit, but there is such a thing as service which is not love in action and is performed to make the performers feel good, or admired, or to obtain hope of a reward from some source of power they think of as their god. While you will understand that the intrinsic degree of love in service is a graded proportion, you will understand that, where there is little real love, the things that take the place of love are sometimes harmful to those involved. So you see how it hurts me to feel that you are serving me or worshipping me if the motive of love is lost or forgotten.

You will tell by my letter that my considerations are such that, in your eyes, I would appear to be what you might call humble and approachable, and quite simple where my affections are concerned. Now you examine in your own imagination the deepest and most perfect form of affection which is my love, and you will realise for yourself that there is no motivation to be above you in the sense of being superior to you.

My responsibility to you is such that I remain your keeper in the overall sense, but, if you knew with what degree of sweet care that keeping is carried out, you would no longer wonder at my 'coming down to your level' as you put it. In the past I have come to you through the kindly help of my most understanding and developed children, and one of these especially fulfilled the task of presenting you with a picture of my nature which you could witness directly. To this day there is hardly one of you on Earth who yet understands that which he tried hard to teach you. The one thing you find so difficult to bear is this very simple and wholehearted affection which I have for you and which he showed you. You would rather have me in any dress but this one.

I know you feel I should be treated with great importance and reverence, but in so doing you make me untouchable and unapproachable, thus you destroy the vision that was given to you with so much love and courage. The one who gave it, and the one he gave it on behalf, of is with you still. There is no reason why you should not gather up the threads again with more understanding and with our help, but you must get rid of your own hard hearts and small-minded attitudes.

My dear son who came to you in this loving way is called by the personal name of Jesus, but with him was my firstborn son, the image of my aspiration for you, who, as my eldest son-daughter, I have given the special task of taking charge of the middle and outer portions of my creation, so that he will keep that aspiration alive in those regions, and in order to give him that experience of such great responsibility and the wisdom that is learned through such responsibility. So my first-born son-daughter is for you all, in this special way, both father and mother to you. He will bear you up as his child until he knows you are ready to become more directly, as he is, my child. For his part of the school of the universe is the lower school, and there he works, and I along with him as any of you might need us. For, in my school, the higher and the lower continually overlap because the highest is always trying to penetrate to the lowest and most outward forms of my creation to make them more and more perfect.

I am afraid that to those of my children who still think that the universe is some accident, and that they are in the position of being some strange growth out of this accident, my words will sound foolish, and they will be repelled by them, but they are in my school nevertheless, and, as they study the world itself more closely, so will this vision of the truth become clearer to them.

Soon now, I hope that this, my beloved eldest son-daughter, who was created and nurtured of me to be a special expression of my highest aspirations for my great family, will come among you to give you greater help and guidance. If and when he does so, I would like to find some of you prepared for what he will wish to say to you.

You must take well to heart all those deeper and simpler considerations that bear upon the matter of my everlasting and undemanding love and affection for each individual one of my children. It will not be for him to describe the especial value of his nature. He will not wish to have to claim his authority and more developed vision in the face of hostility from you. You must realise that it will be for you to recognise him and welcome him with this sweet and gentle gladness that I have tried to prepare for you.

You must try to open your hearts and minds to the great timeless sweep of the picture of my purpose that I have begun to put before you. If you would prepare yourselves, then pay attention to the basis of the affections you can find within yourself. Free yourselves of mechanistic and power interests. Realise that, although I accept all your actions towards me in the best spirit that I can, there comes a time when you must understand that the only aspect of them that I am concerned with is the integrity of the affection which they contain. This affection may be for me as a person, for beauty, kindness, love, or any ideal quality, but it must be truly meant.

Repetitive exercises which treat me as though I were some huge and insensitive robot, to be humoured and tricked into supplying what you need, are far from complimentary and what is worse is that they prevent the proper growth of your own vision of yourself and the worth of the gift I long to give you.

You will notice that I have been talking to you as a person, and using the word person, when I describe our relation to one another. Now you know as well as I do that this can be a misleading term to use for the reason that it can refer to a 'diver’s suit' with little or no 'diver' left in it. By this I mean that the outer physical personality can lose touch with the child of my being who should inhabit and control it. In fact, the child can find itself as the diver being controlled by the diving suit, and it may become identified with the wishes and desires of the strong and heavy diving suit which is a living thing and not a manufactured garment.

Thus our analogy is not a complete one for it only describes half the situation. When you use a man-made diving suit, it is an inert thing that you have to contend with, but when you inhabit a physical body it is a heavy and cumbersome garment, yet far from inert. As a living thing in its own right, your physical body can use and dominate your real identity for the sake of satisfying its own needs and pleasures, and to reduce its fears and anxieties.

You were right to think that I was making too simple a case for the situation you find yourself in, for, while you are an individual portion of my being, you are also likely to be less aware of this reality, and more conscious that you are driven from one thing to another by the needs of your physical nature which can seem to be your whole nature. Part of the work of my school is therefore to show you slowly but surely that the situation is not a correct one when you feel you are identical with your physical personality. The development and strengthening of your real identity needs this opposition, and the stronger the physical characteristics of the body it is associated with the stronger the nature of your real self will have to be if it is to determine and guide the expression of the outer physical nature.

If you find it hard to control this lower nature you will feel it to be better to inhibit this outer self as much as you can because nearly all its actions make you feel ashamed of it, but, if you succeed in being able to control the lower nature, you will wish to express yourself through it as fully as possible, and will feel that this is doing your best in living a life which you are not ashamed of but rather fulfilled through.

You are in a situation where your own private world which you live in will be what you make it. If you allow it to be dominated by the wishes of your physical nature, you will feel alien to it even if you are carried along by it. If you feel like a stranger to yourself it will make you unhappy, and you will doubt your own true identity, and you will lose faith in all the higher values in life. You may disguise the situation to the people around you but inside yourself you will feel lost and helpless and degraded.

My work is to increase your sense of reality to yourself, and make it feel of great value to you, without it spilling over into pride and selfishness. The balance between the over-subdued nature and the over-inflated nature is not easy to keep, and is a necessary balance to be achieved before other values can be built in. The foundation lessons to be taught are thus integrity and responsibility, combined with affection and sympathy, but added to an ability to feel a balanced importance in the scheme of things.

It is not an easy thing to believe you have great value and ability, and at the same time maintain a temperament which does not try to show off and impress people, and perhaps even dominate them. Every new gift I give you with trepidation because I know you are more likely to misuse it before you learn to handle it correctly, so, to me, a gift can appear like an ordeal and a temptation, and I am worried when I see some of you working to achieve special powers which may well be your downfall so far as the graceful balance of your temperament is concerned. On the other hand, I am glad when I see you developing gifts as a result of loving aspiration and wise discrimination, for such gifts I know will surely benefit you and all those associated with you.

I am aware of the great problem and pain that confronts those of you who are trying to live a life which is aimed at expressing those qualities that would please me. I know that the piercing point of such pain is just this very matter that concerns your own intrinsic and individual value and responsibility. It is here that faith is not enough to uphold you in the face of your own self-criticism and feelings of inadequacy.

You can visualise the task to equate the condition of your own nature, and the world around you, with the qualities you sense in my seemingly perfect nature, but when you fall or stumble you easily become submerged in hopelessness and an inner sense of guilt, and self-loathing creeps up inside you, and you are then as a person divided against himself. For one part of you has its face turned towards my sun, and the other part observes your inability and unworthiness to act with love or beauty or grace.

Such is the battlefield, and if you attempt not only to love me but also to understand me, this can make matters worse when life conditions are set against you, for then you wonder if such knowledge is not itself a form of arrogance for which you should rightly be punished and feel remorse. My answer can only be of comfort, it cannot be comfortable.