Living in danger

It is suggested that we do not think about dangers but try to fulfill our mission the best way we can.

What does it mean not to think about danger but to live in danger? To think about danger means to preoccupy oneself with the consequences of danger to such a degree that one paralyzes himself and makes himself unable to find ways and means to face the danger.

Danger, in reality, is not factual but is only a possibility. Thinking about danger makes the possibility a reality for us. The power of danger does not come from its possibility. It comes from the fact that we make it a manifestation within our imagination.

To live in danger means to realize that anything can happen anywhere and anytime. If this realization is clear, one does not waste his time thinking about any particular danger but thinks how to live a life that makes all dangers a "ladder" of achievement.

It will not be an exaggeration if we say that creation is a field of dangers. Dangers are considered as "propelling forces." They are also the best doors of opportunity. A great success comes after mastery of a greater danger.

People must not dwell mentally on dangers but must forge ahead using the dangers as a propelling force.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Leadership Vol.1

Speed

Evil has another way to destroy humanity. In this age, people are fascinated with speed. They think that speed is the main factor for success and development. Because of this false idea, they have created a lie which imposes increasing speed upon us. In a very short time, man will lose control over his time and turn into a wheel in a great machine - and those who push the buttons will determine his speed and make hum run until he is useless.

In an advanced age, people will live in the idea of Infinity. They will not force their bodies to run faster than they are capable of. In our age, life is scheduled in such a way that every hour is planned for something. Very soon, no one will have any private time which is not loaded with something to be done.

Forced speed has many disadvantages. For example, children are forced to act as adults. Man is forced to pace himself and live by the speed of machines. Speed can turn into a disintegrating factor; it can load our minds and hearts and make them machines.

We are receiving three hundred times more knowledge than the average student was two hundred years ago, yet our brain is almost the same brain. We are receiving five hundred times more emotions than an average person received one hundred years ago. Our daily papers, television, and news load us and bring emotions to us from all around the world. Our bodies are under more pressure every day, loaded with radioactivity, short waves, telephone calls, and increasing daily obligations.

One hundred years ago, under normal conditions, a child had only a few emotional shocks in his life. But in these days, a child has, in one day, an equivalent number of emotional shocks to those of the entire life of a child in the past. If he watches a violent or criminal movie, if he hears news of war, crime, terrorism, and earthquakes, his emotional body goes through intense pressure. When he hears that "respectable" people deceive the government, or that a president is impeached or assassinated, or that the police is selling drugs, he undergoes immense mental and emotional shocks. These shocks are responsible for the way he acts at school, the attitude he has toward his parents, the relations that he has in his community, the crimes he will commit in using drugs and alcohol, and his evasion of duty and responsibility.

Why do we load our children's hearts and minds with images of crime, terrorism, destruction, dishonesty, and failure? All of these images will affect their education, behavior, and health. Satan knows this and will make every effort to create more violent, criminal movies, news, and events in order to produce an insane world.

The speed imposed upon our systems is dangerous not only to our physical health but also to our sanity and moral life. We collect information and knowledge in our minds, and fifty percent of that information and knowledge has no use for us or for others. Like junk, we collect information in the backyards of our minds and thus lose precious space in the clutter. Many people cannot store more appropriate data because of the junk that occupies all their space.

We are forced to speedily collect data, emotions, and information. We are forced to do things in a mechanical way. One day we will become only an operator of that machine which we created to do all our jobs and, if the machine goes wrong, we will lose our heads.

We speed our vegetables in growing. We demand that our children grow up sooner. We want immediate responses, rewards, and solutions to our problems. We have lost the state of timelessness. Timelessness is health, relaxation, and tuning in with Infinity. Timelessness originates not from knowledge but from liberation.

We are imposing such a speed upon our mechanisms that we will end the life of humanity on this planet.  We must slow down. Speed leads to insanity if it is not controlled with patience. Patience is a feeling of Infinity.

When merchants brought big clocks to certain eastern countries for the first time, they were examined and considered a tool of Satan. They attacked the merchants and destroyed the clocks with hammers. My grandparents used to tell us this story again and again to make us aware of how ignorant those people were who thought clocks were the tool of Satan. But on closer analysis, there was an intuitive perception in the actions of those people. We have turned life into a machine through clocks, watches, and speedometers.

We force ourselves every year with greater and greater speed, paying for it through our ill health and insanity. Our consciousness is wrapped in the concept of time in such a way that we do not have a period of ten minutes of timelessness. Even the periods of "rest" are flooded with thoughts of what will be done after that short period of "rest." It is only in a state of timelessness that the health of the body, the heart, and the mind can be restored.

Certain people are already machines. They run by a speed imposed upon them because speed has become equal to survival. To survive, one must continually increase his speed of thinking, feeling, acting, and even speaking and writing.

One day a garage mechanic told me that he could change a tire every five minutes. "What is your purpose in doing that?" I asked. "More money," he said. Months later, I went back to have a tire changed. He was sitting on an old battery. "What is the matter?" I asked him. "I was in the hospital for three months.  They changed my tires, but my engine is not running very well and I cannot work for a while". One can "change tires" but if his engine is worn out, new tires will not help. We pay for violating the principle of timelessness.

The whole concept of time and speed is an illusion fabricated by dark forces to exterminate human existence from this planet. How can we isolate ourselves from such a mechanical life based on time and speed? The only way that still presents hope lies in the moments of meditation in which we may enter the domain of timelessness and feel a deep relaxation from the imposed pressures and demands of time and speed. There is no cure except through a catastrophic explosion or through a well-organized plan to decrease the demands of time and speed and give people an opportunity to relax and live in ease, at least for a few moments, in the joy of timelessness. Ecstasy, concentration, and contemplation are moments of timelessness.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Battling Dark Forces

Why some criminals are strong and healthy?

It is interesting to note that sometimes criminals and those who work against the interests of their fellow human beings, causing great difficulties in their lives, have healthy bodies and live a long life. Such people have "integrity," though it is a negative integrity which gives them strength. They act as a unit in their physical, emotional, and mental life. They do not have cleavages.

The reason that they do not have cleavages is that they have their own standards, and they believe in their standards no matter how far their standards are from the standards of righteous and holy ones. They keep their "integrity" and build a personality crystallized on the lines of negative or anti-evolutionary force.

This continues until the Soul sends a beam of light into the personality and creates an opposing thoughtform, which later will serve as the base for evolutionary forces. As the influence of the Soul dawns and increases in the personality, the problems of the subject increase and multiply. He confronts physical, emotional, and mental problems, as if all the creditors were coming at once and demanding their payment. The reason for this is that the inner "integrity" is distorted, and no form can exist for long without inner unity, inner harmony or integrity.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Leadership vol.1

Projected thoughts

We sometimes are slowed down or become crystallized because people project to us certain thoughts - for example, sexual thoughts, hateful thoughts, evil thoughts, or criminal thoughts. When these thoughts are projected into our aura, we feel as though we are swimming in a stagnated pool.

I once knew a very beautiful and fiery girl who was studying and doing meditation. She told me she had decided to become a model, and soon after she posed for nude photographs which appeared in a men's magazine. Three months later she put away all her books and stopped meditating. One night she called me, crying, "I don't want to read anymore. What is wrong with me?" Millions of men were looking at her pictures and directing their sexual energies toward her. She was flooded with their desires, and even though she kept herself physically pure, she was being polluted mentally.

-Torkom Saraydarian
Spiritual Regeneration

What is hope?

Hope is the name of an energy which mobilizes all your forces and energies toward a set goal. Unless you believe that you can do something, you cannot do it.

Hope makes impossible things possible. Hope does not mean to sit and hope that things will happen. Hope is very different from "hoping." Hope does not make you lie down and dream that things will happen. Hope makes you mobilize all your resources to make your hope incarnate and be substantial.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Education as Transformation vol.1

The pursuit of happiness

Remember that hilarity has nothing to do with joy. Hilarity is a disease. "The pursuit of happiness" must be understood correctly. The pursuit of happiness is not a process of being happy at the expense of others. The pursuit of happiness is an intelligent way of living to bring happiness to the entire humanity, to animals, plants, birds, and all of Nature.

The pursuit of happiness is not license of sex, drugs, crimes, and exploitation. The pursuit of happiness is a process of healthy living, healthy aspiration, and clear thinking. It is a life lived in "harmlessness, self-forgetfulness, and right speech."

The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of freedom - freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of religion, freedom of right speech. There is no happiness, unless the human essence is capable of being free from all conditions which prevent him from being beautiful, full of goodness, righteous, and joyful.

Unhappiness is a very contagious disease. Those who fall into unhappiness are those who break the laws of love, unity, and service. We must try to heal through the medicine of joy. It will take time, but we will eventually do it.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Joy and Healing

Real authority

Real authority is not one who does whatever he wants to do, but one who knows and is, and acts in accordance with laws and principles. He is an authority for those who know little and are not very developed on their path of evolution, but who are sensitive to the knowledge and the beingness of the authority.

Knowledge is not enough to create authority. One needs also the ability to make that knowledge applicable to himself and to others. Realization is the moment when our knowledge transforms our life, causing a steady transmutation of the substance of the vehicles and enables us to function as the embodiment of our knowledge. Only then do we become authorities on our own level.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Psyche & Psychism

Simplicity

Simplicity. Higher thinking is not confused thinking. It is clear, correct, and to the point. You can see the great simplicity in the words of Buddha and Christ. Simplicity does not mean a lack of richness of meaning, a shallowness, but a depth which you can see because of its clarity.

Simplicity is directness. It is the ability to present a great beauty, a great truth without confusion.

In simplicity the words or forms of expression do not hinder the light of the manifesting idea, vision, or spirit. They do not curtail it. They do not pretend that they are spirit. That is why we are told that "the letter kills the spirit," or any form of expression weakens or even kills the spirit when it pretends to be the spirit.

In simplicity the expression is the lamp that holds the light and makes it manifest as it is. In simplicity the form disappears in the light of the spirit, in the light of ideas, meaning, and purpose.

In simplicity there is soul-to-soul communication. In simplicity the words are silent to make the spirit sing.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Thought & the Glory of Thinking

Being born in times of crises

People sometimes complain and say, "If I lived in different condition or in a different country, my light would probably shine out in a greater magnitude." Once there were two brothers. One was living in luxury because of an inheritance from his wife. The other was trying to do everything possible to educate himself, to achieve victory over his nature and weaknesses, to help and enlighten people. In the end both passed away, and the one who had been living a luxurious life was found in the lower astral plane, while the other one went to the higher mental plane.

Once when the brother living on the lower astral plane asked a visiting master the reason for such an unrighteousness, He replied, "Those who face difficult conditions, serious problems, obstacles of many kinds, complications and dangers in life grow faster toward Higher Worlds than those who fall into luxury."

Before the Spark is ready to reincarnate, It decides where to go. Some of the Sparks choose easy conditions, shallow waters of life, pleasures, etc. Others choose difficult conditions in which to exercise their spiritual faculties and prove their achievements and wisdom. They incarnate in those cycles in which the world is going through crises. We call such souls "heroes" who knowingly choose difficult conditions of life because intuitively they know that difficult times give the greatest possibilities to prove our worthiness to come closer to the Central Magnet.

Those who are consciously born at this time must feel proud and double their efforts to help humanity enter into greater light, in spite of the spreading darkness. There will be no regrets or complaints from the Sparks of light, only a joyful acceptance of conditions and a conscious effort to shine Their light.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Education as Transformation vol.1

Are we our consciousness?

Q: Are we our consciousness?

A: We are not our consciousness. We use the consciousness. Consciousness is our mirror, made of a very high substance in which things are reflected for us to look at until we surpass our consciousness. A day will come when we do not use our consciousness. We will be aware, and then the day will come when we will no longer need our awareness; we will simply be.

For example, I think about you and use my consciousness, defining you in certain ways. Later, I will surpass that and become aware of what you are, without reason or logic. In the third stage, I will no longer need awareness because I am you! This is progressive beingness.

We use our consciousness; our awareness determines the consciousness which we use. The level of consciousness which we use continuously affects the atoms in our mechanism. Consciousness sets the page, the rhythm, and the measure. According to that measure or vibration, the physical, emotional, and mental atoms absorb and synchronize. Whatever the consciousness is, that is what the bodies are.

Consciousness determines the level of matter, the elements which you absorb from space and use to build the bodies. The mechanisms you use constantly ascend and change; they change as you change. Until your body is one hundred percent pure, you cannot be free of it; you are stuck to it. Until your emotional body is totally pure, you cannot rid yourself of it. Any impurity in the body attaches it to you. Only by refining and purifying the bodies can you break your link with them. The mental body must be illuminated ninety percent to be free of it.

But the human being builds a house and then destroys it the next day. He builds a chateau or a palace and then destroys it. He builds a road and then bulldozes it. He builds a nice body, then goes out drinking and does wrong things, destroying his body. He makes his emotions happy and beautiful, then hates, feels angry and greedy, and takes revenge. Mentally he thinks about great, beautiful plans, and then he gets on the telephone and gossips. He builds with one hand and destroys with the other. He builds himself and then destroys what he has built. We must pay attention, building continually toward perfection, being careful that we do not do something which will bring the whole building down.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma & Reincarnation

The glory in you that will start to shine out

Look at yourself physically, emotionally and mentally. Look at your job, friends, home, education and life-goals. Are there elements in them which are against the highest or the best that you are capable of? Slowly you must try to eliminate your ugly emotions and ugly thoughts. You must find yourself refusing to go places which will not bring out the best in you, and slowly low-level friends must drop away. You must not want to do anything that lessens your nobility.

The glory in you that will start to shine out is your Divinity. The genius and talent that will radiate from you is the light of the Inner Sun within you that you are manifesting. As others feel the warmth of this radiation, they will notice your grandeur, the Cosmic beauty that you are expressing.


-Torkom Saraydarian
Talks on Agni vol.1

Religious superstitions engraved in childhood

Many people break their former religious or traditional limitations and begin to open their sails on the oceans of new interests. They enjoy their new adventures for a long time, generally until they are sixty or sixty-five years old and in some cases only until they are thirty or thirty-five. Then they slowly return to their former interests, religion, traditions, or the habits of their childhood.

An average man in his seventies usually reflects the habits and mentality of his childhood when he was seven years old. This is the result of beliefs or traditions having been imposed. Converting people to your religion or traditions is the best way to create conflict within your church or group in the future. If the converted ones are in the majority, or if they are a powerful minority, and they are reverting to past beliefs, they will take over your church or group and translate your religion or tradition in a way that agrees with their former faith or habits.

How does this work?

Childhood impressions are the strongest because the vehicles are pure. The young mind does not have the disturbances or turbulences of adulthood, and the incoming impressions are almost carved in the deeper consciousness of the child. These impressions are not gathered there through logic or reasoning but by faith. Faith is total acceptance.

Logic and reason are ways of dialogue or negotiation. Early adulthood is a time of exploration and interaction with ideas. As a man grows older, his reason and logic weaken and his faith grows stronger.

Childhood faith stands there as a part of his being. As he becomes older, his beingness becomes his only refuge. Man takes refuge only in those things which he believed without any doubt in his mind, things which he accepted on faith.

Doubt is the substance of disintegration. Whenever a man doubts some logic or knowledge, that logic or knowledge does not last long. Curiously enough, dogmas, doctrines, or beliefs impressed upon the child through his faith are the factors which create doubt in all things that he tries to study in the future. As such people grow old, they have less trust in other people or different faiths or traditions.

The cure for all this is to impart children universal principles without dogmas, doctrines, and beliefs. Universal principles will be the foundation of future right relationship with all traditions which have universal principles in them.

Superstitions engraved in childhood will not lose their power over a person until the person clears his superstitions and illusions through the expansion of his consciousness and the transformation of his life through the fire of Intuition. Outer pressure to change superstitions, illusions, deep-seated convictions, and beliefs proves to be a failure.

As a man becomes more spiritual, or as he evolves toward greater achievements of Beauty, Goodness, Righteousness, Joy, and Freedom, he does not limit his life through any separative interest or any particular religion or politics. Instead he expands his life within those principles which tend to synthesize and unite.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Leadership vol.1

Communication in the subtle worlds

In the subjective world, speech is not used; communication is through thoughtwaves. Those who have not passed away but can function in the subjective world can formulate thoughtwaves into words. But those who have left their physical brain have only their mental body, and if the mental body is not developed and cultivated by the science of spiritual thinking, then the person has a real problem in the subtle world. He cannot understand what is going on there. He cannot communicate with people. The guides, or invisible helpers, cannot teach or lead him. It takes hundreds and thousands of years to communicate with him through some sparks of thinking still left from the physical existence.

Conscious progress in the subjective world depends highly on our ability to think, to send and receive thoughts, and to understand them in their abstract values. This is what the science of meditation teaches.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Spring of Prosperity

Infinity and right use of time

Some people say that they have all eternity to work out their salvation and they use this as an excuse to wallow in pleasures now. They feel that the future will take care of the mess they are creating now. They don’t realize that they will have to clean their own mess in the future. They don’t care about air pollution now and they don’t consider that they may not have air to breathe tomorrow. They never consider the adaptations that the body has to make in order to live in bad air. Such people do not understand the damage they are doing to their permanent atoms, which will bring them much pain and suffering in the future.

The disciple does not use the limitlessness of Infinity as an excuse to dance while the building is burning. The disciple does not care about those things which are tied to the finite. He knows that desire is tied to the finite. If you give a man a thousand dollars, he will soon want a million. The disciple sees attachment to the finite world as a rejection of his Divinity, and he lives only for the Divine Manifestation. He does not betray his own Divinity by identification with limitations.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Talks on Agni vol.1

The voice and the subconscious

It is possible that a person has a great wealth of achievements but cannot share them with others or use them for his own benefit because of his voice and manners. This occurs when the person makes every kind of effort to improve his inner man, but his subconscious mind and the outer example in his environment, especially in childhood, enslave him and impose upon him a special tone of voice, a way of speech and manners. It is here that such a person needs help. And the help is to change the voice and manners and bring them into line with his achievements.

I remember a high level minister whose voice was like the voice of a chicken. He used to say wonderful things, but without deep affect. When I gave him special exercises so his voice would reflect his own level, he became the most influential minister.

Artificial exercises to change our voice create various psychological problems. The real help is not to make people change their voice but their level of consciousness and clean their subconscious mind. If these two are not done, a person can change his pitch but not his tonality. Tonality holds the secret, and it is the one that affects people and affects the cells and atoms of their bodies.

Spiritually advancing people change their voices and tonality, but this comes naturally. With such a change, their magnetism and their power of influence over other people is also changed.

A voice that is the expression of jealousy, revenge, vanity, or ego always sounds the same and hurts people’s consciousness, even if he or she talks about joyful things. The subconscious mind dominates the tonality of the voice.

-Torkom Saraydarian

The subconscious mind and the Chalice

Appreciation, recognition

Many people take walks in the early morning and see beautiful flowers. They may appreciate them. But when it comes to appreciating members of their family, these same people are like frozen fish! For example, they say things like “I don’t care if you are singing, studying ballet or writing poetry; I just want you to work and make money.” That person will eventually lose his sense of worth, leading to criminal actions.

This has not yet been researched. I once asked a criminologist why he thought people became criminals. He replied, “Because of their genes, environment, and so on.” I said, “They become criminals because you don’t recognize them.”

You can see this in your children. Your children do many obnoxious things for only one reason - to get recognition. They want to bring out the beauty from inside themselves. They are "pregnant" with it, but there is no doctor or nurse to deliver it. Recognition is the "doctor" and "nurse."

-Torkom Saraydarian

The sense of responsibility in society

Food is a condensation of the sun's energy

Food, particularly plant food, is a condensation of the sun's energy, as well as more subtle energy from the stars and other sources in the universe. Though the influences of these celestial bodies is indeed subtle, scientists have discovered that the surface of the Earth is constantly bombarded by radiation from different celestial bodies, including the moon, star systems, and other sources of radiation in the universe. Plants take these radiations into their energetic systems and ultimately transfer them to humans when they are eaten by humans. From a spiritual perspective, these energies are simply various condensations of the Divine cosmic energy In the process of our eating food the cosmic, solar, stellar, lunar, and other universal energies stored in the food are released to be absorbed directly into the human organism. We can experience the whole universe in each bite of our food.

Food is a love note from God. Its letters are written by the rays of the sun. It says I love you and I shall take care of you and sustain you with the offerings of my earth. If we take time to read the love letter, by chewing carefully and feeling the messages that are stored in food by the sun, earth, wind, water, and even by those who have grown, harvested, and prepared the food, its assimilation takes on a whole new meaning. This is a specific way of receiving God's grace, a holy sacrament to be experienced slowly, carefully, and consciously.

-Gabriel Cousens

Conscious eating

Maintaining equilibrium on the waves of incoming energies

The equilibrium of man, nations, and humanity is periodically disturbed by an increasing flow of spiritual energies from constellations, from Higher Worlds, or from human, planetary, and solar centers. Such times are calls for equilibrium, or calls for serious striving to create balance and equilibrium between the future and the past; between the incoming energies and the created forms of every kind.

This call is met by expanding our consciousness and absorbing the new energies within a progressively refining system of bodies, emotions, thoughts, and actions.

Often these inpouring energies are the answer to mass invocations and prayers. Striving is, among many other things, an effort to maintain equilibrium on the waves of incoming energies.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1

Harmlessness

People think that to be harmless in a society means to withdraw into your skin and bury yourself in your own petty pleasures. This is not so. A harmless person tries to eliminate all those sources which hurt people, distort their future, and lead them into physical and spiritual failure.

Harmlessness is an aggressive interest in the welfare of humanity, and is one of the attributes of a warrior for Goodness, Beauty, Righteousness, Joy, and Freedom. Harmlessness is not a passive virtue. It actively works and even attacks with the intention to love and uplift.

-Torkom Saraydarian

The Creative Fire

Balance and equilibrium

We create imbalance in our system through the amount of food or the kind of food that we eat. We create imbalance in our system through speeding where we should go slowly and slowing down on the paths on which we should speed. We create imbalance in our system by thinking, living, and acting around the axis of our self, forgetting the All-Self; by always thinking “me, me, me, I, I, I,”...without remembering that we are cells in the body of the Whole Self. We must find a point of equilibrium between these two extremes and live a life that is healthy for ourselves and also beneficial to the All-Self. We must live our individual lives in a way that our lives turn into a contribution for the Common Good.

When people are one-sided, they enter a state of imbalance. For example, spiritual people used all their time to count the angels, and they left the world affairs to those who were materialists. Now we have a world which on one side is very idealistic, and on the other side has material luxuries without purpose or vision.

Our personal life must have a balance between, for example:

• sleep and work
• rest and labor
• income and expenditure
• spiritual life and worldly occupations
• body and spirit
• self and the All-Self

If we do not create an equilibrium between these factors, we fail. We must remember that matter is as spiritual as the spirit, and that spirit is as material as matter.

Extremists and fanatics can belong either to the matter or to the spirit. In both cases, they are very dangerous because they use matter or spirit for their own advantage, and against the interests of others. Fanatics and extremists lose a major balance between the individual and the whole, and they use all that is available to them against the whole.

In the human being, the Solar Angel is the point of equilibrium between the human soul and the Cosmic Self, but It controls the balance between man and Higher Forces carefully so that man progresses safely – if he wants to. Thus the Solar Angel impresses the human soul to cultivate his body, his emotions, and his mind but in the meantime to cultivate his willpower, love, and light so that the advancing mechanism of the personality can absorb and use creatively the increasing flow of spiritual energies.

Every time you are going to an extreme, remember that you are out of order. But people manipulate such a concept and think that if one is noble, he must try to be ignoble in order to balance himself; or if he is chaste, he must go into prostitution to balance himself. To make the above concept clear and simple, we can say: If you are sitting in a cave for a long meditation, have an equal amount of time for serving human beings. If you are reading and meditating all day, you are going out of balance if you do not create for yourself an equal time for work, labor, or service.

Only those who understand the secret of balance and equilibrium can progress into higher spheres of substance and higher spheres of spirituality. Every expansion of consciousness and every initiation is achieved through a moment of equilibrium in which your material and spiritual sides are harmonized to such a degree that an escape toward a higher state of consciousness becomes possible.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1