MY FRIEND OF OLD:

The past six months have seen you making many readjustments in your life. As you have fulfiled your outer obligations in the various fields of life expression, there has been a simultaneous freeing of yourself from the "pulling hands" of associated friends and people. The necessity for an inner freedom, preserved inviolate, is for you an urgent one, but you are learning fast the lesson that freedom is a state of mind and not a condition of being. The fear of an isolated loneliness has oft beset you, yet you have realized at the same time that that type of loneliness is oft the setting of the disciple. The increased sensitivity of a disciple's vehicles causes him gradually to become aware of the true world of subtler values.

For what you are being prepared you have been told and know. You know also that a deeper attachment to humanity, paralleling a finer and more clear-cut and clearly realized detachment is for you, therefore, a major objective. I have in this last sentence summed up for you your immediate problem, and I tell you also for your encouragement that you are making real progress towards your goal.

One thing, my brother, I feel you need to realize more definitely; that is that a life of fuller expression in outer service on the physical plane is required and would further aid you towards your goal. Your problems are, however, known to me and this extension of your outer influence (radiating from an inner controlled center) and the developing of a wider range of contacts must come slowly. But it must surely come and will, if your intention and thought are directed towards these ends. As you grow older, there is much that you have to give. The wisdom which you have necessarily wrought out in the furnace of pain and of suffering must be available and used as the Way of Light and of Joy opens up before you. I hold out before you no illusions of a great work to be performed for which you are divinely predestined. The eventual great work, successfully carried forward, which falls to the lot of all who achieve the great Initiations, grows out of a steadily expanding consciousness, a steady decentralization, demonstrating in a constant outgoing in compassion and understanding to the needs [311] of the little ones upon life's way, and a greater realization of the nature of the whole. Learn, therefore, to include more people within the range of your daily thought. It is good exercise for the disciple in training. Let your influence, welling forth from a steady and radiant center, make itself felt in ever widening ranges of contact. Seize each opportunity for a more expanded interplay with other lives, touching them wherever you possibly can, and achieve in that way that fluidity of response which will carry you forth upon the tide of an ever richer service.

You are at the point where you can - if you so will - achieve a higher and more potent rhythm. Its potency and its vibration must be felt outside the home circle and contacts or your relationships with your group brothers. In what manner that extension of service must demonstrate is for you gradually to find out. I but indicate to you possibility. One thing I can, however, tell you and that is that it will come through a deepening of your meditation life, and not through an outer search for such contacts; it will come through the development of a true spiritual understanding which will make the "magnetic beat" (as it is esoterically called) of such potency in your life that you will not need to move from where you are because those whom you can aid will come to you increasingly. For you, the consecrated pen, the dedicated hour, the quickness to seize an opportunity for a carefully chosen word, and the sense of reticent security which you can convey to others will be the chief methods which you will employ. Can you grasp the value to the troubled aspirant of finding in a brother that power to aid which is based on a trained reticence and a sure knowledge?