How beautiful is the world that surrounds us! The sunrise over the eastern mountaintops is one of the most exquisitely beautiful things I know.
It is so beautiful because it calls forth within us a harmony of understanding akin to the natural beauty which we see painted on the eastern sky. All beauty is in the consciousness of the perceiver therefore, where, in a very true sense, all things that we cognize are.
You cannot see beauty outside unless you have beauty within you. You cannot understand beauty unless you yourself are beautiful inside. You cannot understand harmony unless you yourself in your inner parts are harmony. All things of value are within yourself, and the outside world merely offers you the stimulus, the stimulation, of and to the exercise of the understanding faculty within you.
There is beauty in understanding, and understanding springs only from an understanding heart, paradoxical as that may sound at first hearing. It is the understanding heart that has vision.
The seer trains himself to open the seeing eye, and nature speaks to him in tones which grow with each year more entrancing, more wonderful, because he is growing greater inside. His understanding is broadening and deepening. The whispering of the trees, the susurrus of the leaves and their rustling, the slow boom of the waves on the shingle of the shore, the chirp of the cricket, the cooing of the dove, the sound of a human voice -- strident though oft it is -- contain marvels for him. He recognizes his kinship with all that is, he realizes that he is but one element in a most marvelous mosaic of life in which he is inseparably bound, and that even as the vision grows it becomes ever more beautiful and sublime; and he knows that the vision sublime is there, and strives to see it ever more clearly.
Every tree, every flower, every atom of the mineral crunched under your feet as you tread the surface of the earth, everything that is, had you the seeing eye, you could learn from. Have you never looked into the bosom of a flower? Have you never studied the beauty, symmetry, glory, around you? Have you never looked at the rising or the setting sun and marveled at the paintings on the eastern or western horizon? Have you never looked deep into the eye of a fellow human being, looked with a seeing eye on your own kind? Have you never found marvels there? What a wonderful world we are surrounded by! Yet with all the beauty surrounding us, the heart aches and the mind is overwhelmed with the thought of the woes of mankind caused by the three dire problems -- old age, disease, and death.
Learn to control the mind. Man is a child of the gods, and his mind should be godlike, his thoughts aspiring, his heart constantly opening in love ever more; and therefore his attitude should be godlike also.
Go into the silent places of your heart; enter into the chambers so quiet and still of your inner being. Soon you will learn to knock at the doors of your own heart. Practice makes perfect. Intuition will then come to you. You will have knowledge immediately; you will know truth instantly. That is the Way; that is the teaching.
In these silent places you receive illumination, you receive visions of truth, because your spirit -- the core of you, the heart of you -- has gone into the very core of being, where it is native, from which it is separated never, from which it originally sprang, and with which you are in direct and unceasing communication.
Realize this wonderful truth; take it to heart. For there are fountains inexhaustible of wisdom, of knowledge, and of love -- yes, and power -- power over self first of all, which means power over nature, in which we live and move and have our being. For the core of your being is the inner god in you, the divine spirit, the Christos-spirit, the Buddhic splendor.
It is into these quiet places of the soul, into these deep silences of the heart -- that is to say, the inmost of the inmost of the human being -- that enter the Great Ones when they want to acquire more light and greater knowledge; for by so doing they enter into the very structure and fabric of the universe, and therefore know truth at first hand, because they become in their own minds and intelligences -- in the interpreting organ we call the mentality -- one with that universe, vibrating synchronously, sympathetically, with the vibrations on all planes of the Eternal Mother. There they become at one with All, and therefore know truth intuitively.