"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 heavens 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 meditation—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.

"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.

" . . . 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 beholder 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."

"It is not the picture or the piece of paper in itself, for that is just an instrument the Ascended Masters use. The same is true of statues. Nor does it mean that we are idolators. It means that we are alchemists of the sacred fire and we understand the law."

" . . . How easy it is to be taken away, here and there, and to lose the sense of discrimination when consciousness moves from truth to a little error and then one more gross, until suddenly it is so gross as to totally engulf the child. So it is with spiritual energies that gradually become psychic through the vanity of the ego.

" . . . It is because people prefer to love themselves as human beings, and therefore in an attempt to love that human self one finds that the human self, because it cannot be perfected, is not necessarily worthy of love—for the soul retains the memory of the perfect image of Self who is Christ the Lord and this alone is worthy of that unconditional love which cannot be fully accorded to the unpredictable, whimsical human self. And this, beloved, is the root of the dilemma of human love as well as the love/hate patterns which sometimes plague human relationships.

"And thus one's moorings must be altered. One must penetrate to the core of life, to the origin of all things, to the descent of the soul from God, to the realization that the compelling force of being is one's divinity!

" . . . And do you know that the saints in their desiring to serve have never been satisfied until they could pay back ten times what they have wrought as a burden against the Body of God upon Earth—or any individual part thereof?

" . . . You have something to give which even you yourselves have not understood. It is the simple joy of the victory of the Light demonstrated in daily life.

" . . . In the name of the Living Word let there be drawn to this focus those hearts who understand the meaning of the conveyance of the Mission by the divine art through media, through the Word, through example in every form that it can be given, through the illustration of life—beginning with oneself."