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

Protecting children from imbalance and psychological dangers

There is imbalance in our entertainment system and in the process of our maturity, growth, and learning. Once a family brought me their seven or eight-year-old son and said, "This boy is the most obnoxious boy at home and in the neighborhood. He does things that no one can imagine."

I talked with the boy. He said that he liked to watch television three or four hours every day when his parents were not home. By watching three or four hours of television daily, that seven-year-old boy filled his mental and emotional baggage with so many events and unassimilated experiences that he was no longer living in his brain but in the memories of the television programs. He was a grownup before his time. And because he could not digest, analyze, and relate these recordings, he was out of balance. Anyone who is out of balance will do lots of obnoxious things.

Too often people are doing this to their children, leading them to television, movies, and different experiences for which they are not ready. Children must have their childhood. When they are too loaded with crime, terror, and violence, the lessons they learn in the Subtle Worlds will not last too long and will vanish, leaving them to the disturbing currents of life experiences.

Five-year-old children are deeply worried about nuclear fallout, atomic war, and terrorism. How can the best flowers in them flourish under such pressures? You protect little seedlings from winds and other dangers, but you do not protect your children from psychological dangers because it has become almost an impossibility to do so. You pump into their minds everything about their religion, their tradition, their nationality...to such a degree that they can no longer fit into a world community in which there are many religions, traditions, and nationalities as respected as theirs. This is how we create imbalance in their consciousness and in the world society, and then try to solve the problems emerging from such attitudes.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1

The high vibration of live-food diet

A live-food, or even a primarily cooked vegetarian diet is a powerful aid to the healing process. The level of health stimulated by such a diet creates a whole new experience and lightness in the body. The vibration of the somato-nervous system becomes so high that it literally forces the lower-vibration, negative thoughts out of the system. These negative thoughts become incompatible with a higher vibration of energy that begins to fill the system.

Metaphorically speaking, a live-food diet brings so much lightness to the system that “the light is able to dispel the darkness.” Paradoxically, this is one reason I recommend that people make a slow transition to vegetarianism and particularly to a raw-food cuisine. I see this release of stored negativity as healthy and healing if one creates the proper psychological space to process these thoughts.

-Gabriel Cousens

Conscious eating

Diet and repressed emotions

A vegetarian diet, and particularly a raw-food diet, can be threatening to some people because it directly forces them to face their food issues, and indirectly, their life issues.

Live foods have so much nourishment in them that considerably less food is needed to get the same amount of nutrition. Needing less food for optimal nutrition, however, forces us to observe whatever food compulsions we may have. If we compulsively need to eat more food and the body actually needs less food, it becomes increasingly harder to deny this contradiction. Many negative thoughts may arise when beginning to eat less, particularly on a raw-food diet or when fasting. Because of the highly energetic qualities of raw food, it seems harder to suppress feelings when eating it compared to overeating cooked and nonvegetarian types of foods to numb ourselves to life. On raw foods, repressed emotions and thoughts seem to be more easily released by the body-mind complex.

-Gabriel Cousens

Conscious eating

Distorted creativity

Distorted creativity: the pressure of impressions from higher spheres reaches the artist, but because of the pollution of glamor, illusions, and vanities found in him, he distorts these impressions.

We can see such distortions in music, painting, and dancing; in science, politics, communication, finance, religion, and education. Such distortions are often carried on through channeling and mediumistic activities.

It is also possible for dark forces to use such artists to increase crimes and cause degeneration and corruption, often without the artist’s agreement. It is to be observed that such artists use drugs and exercises to stimulate their various etheric or physical centers. Often they expose themselves to hypnotic suggestions and carry on their work in extreme fanaticism and zeal.

-Torkom Saraydarian

The Creative Fire

Microbes, germs and bad karma

There is a secret regarding the immune system. When the immune system is destroyed, AIDS results. This means that your protective energies, your vitality is defeated by your own actions, by the things you spoke, thought, or did. You killed your own vitality and now germs can attack you and do anything they want because you are no longer under the protection of light. That is why Christ advises us to "live in light and always let your light shine." It is vitality that shines out.

Microbes and germs are living entities like us. But they become destructive to us when we have wrong karma. They become instruments of retribution, helping us to correct ourselves. They are agents of karma to straighten us. If a person does not have bad karma, they will never touch him.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Battling Dark Forces

Karma and "good karma"

Karma is not punishment. It is a law which gives you a continuous chance to correct your path by learning discrimination.

We wonder whether karma is not a reward as well. But God is good. We live, move, and have our being in Him - if we do not create artificial walls by living a life that is not in harmony with the higher laws of Nature.

There is no "good karma"'' because we do not earn good karma; it is already ours. To the average consciousness however, we say that good karma is the result of all that you do that is in harmony with the Laws of Goodness.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Appropriate food

If the food one eats enhances, or at least doesn't interfere with, one's communion with the Divine and the flow of cosmic energy in the body, the food is appropriate. If after eating, one feels heavy and slow because so much energy is needed for digestion that attention is drawn to the stomach, then one is eating the wrong food.

If one's energy feels drained, or the communion with the Divine is blocked before, during, or after the meal, it is an indication that some factor in the process of eating needs to be changed. If one's ability to sustain meditation is enhanced and one experiences greater harmony with the forces of nature, this is strong evidence that what one is eating is appropriate.

-Gabriel Cousens Md

Conscious Eating

The loss of the soul

Every time you think, speak, write, or do anything, first check to see whom you are serving. Are you serving materialism, hatred, revenge, separatism, or anger? Or are you serving Light, Love, Beauty, Righteousness, Joy, and Freedom. Which are you serving? Maybe you are blind and are forever serving the armies of darkness and have never realized this. But the moment you find out what you are doing, free yourself because you will be led into greater darkness.

Let us say that you sold your soul to the dark forces. Eventually your physical, emotional, and mental bodies will disintegrate in space, and the soul that you are will eventually evaporate. You will lose your individuality. This is what is meant by “losing the individuality,” or the soul. The Universe is very economical; it dissolves and makes fertilizer out of anything that is no longer serving Its purpose. If a leaf can no longer fulfill its purpose, it falls to the ground and becomes fertilizer; it is gone forever as a leaf. You lose your individuality forever and evaporate if you follow the path of darkness.

You may incarnate three, four, five hundred times, as long as there is still a chance. But if your evaporation is at hand, you are finished. There is no incarnation because incarnation is an opportunity to awaken and come to your senses and say, “Let me choose the right path this time.” But teachers, ministers, and priests do not discuss these things because their congregations would be afraid.

You think that you have a soul, that you are immortal. But this is a false doctrine, a false religion and philosophy. You build your soul. You are a ray of Divine Light. That Light comes to the mineral kingdom and slowly passes into higher kingdoms, eventually building itself into a soul. Unless you build your immortality, you are not immortal.

You have so many teachers and books that you fall into the wrong lane – the lane of darkness. The dark forces penetrated into the Teaching and are telling you things that do not exist.

Dark forces are scientifically trained professionals. They have great certificates and diplomas. They are very smart. Unless a person is very smart, he cannot be a part of the dark forces. When the human soul does not develop to a certain stage of trial and error and is stuck in the traps of the dark forces, the human soul gradually disintegrates. The human soul is nothing else but a focus of energy which is developing consciousness and mind. When this is not accomplished, it disintegrates and once again becomes part of the chaotic forces of Nature.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Battling Dark Forces

How to make our emotional body healthy

How we can make our emotional body really healthy, once we know what is sickness and what is health of the emotional body?

The first step is aspiration toward Beauty, Goodness, Righteousness, Joy, Freedom, and Cooperation. If you see any beauty or any goodness, give it water and fertilizer so that it grows. Appreciate it. I knew a couple who were having problems at home. But when the husband started to appreciate the things his wife did for him, peace came to their home.

Christ once said, "If you give even one cup of water to someone in My name, it will not be forgotten." If one cup of water must not be forgotten, do not forget the good things that are around you. Appreciate each other. Appreciate your health, your body, your heart, your mind, your family, your job, and the life that you are living.

We are not talking about abstract things; we are talking about practical things what we can use. This is more important than to know how many apartments are built in heaven. Maybe ten million are built there, but who cares? We should just live a beautiful life first and then worry about these things.

The second step is to worship God. To worship God does not mean day and night to pray and read the Bible. To worship God means to admire that Almighty Power Who created everything. This kind of worship cleans your emotional nature and takes you away from your selfishness and vanities.

The third step is to know that the emotions of other people affect your life and to be careful about communicating with others when they are under the influence of negative emotions. People can trap you in their anger, in their jealousy, in their revenge, in their fanaticism; and suddenly you are caught in a whirlpool. You can become immediately trapped in the emotions of other people. If you see that people are emotionally violent, stay away. Watch them; be careful; and keep your sanity so that you are not swept up.

The fourth step is always to try to bless people. If you do not like someone, bless him. If you like him, your love is already a blessing for him. Always bless people, even if they do nasty things. Blessing is a contact with the soul in others.

The next step is to be always joyful. No matter what happens try always to keep that joy. A great Sage says that Great Ones enter into battle and complicated labors with true joy and that no one can enter Their abodes without joy. Joyfulness means that your physical, emotional, and mental natures are not controlling you, but you are controlling them.

The next step is immediately to replace any negative emotions with a positive one. For example, if a feeling of hatred comes, change it into love. If someone comes into your mind and you say, "I hate him," immediately change it and say, "I love you." If an ugly picture comes to your mind, change it into a beautiful picture. If a fear comes, change it into courage.

People sometimes know the whole Bible, but they cannot do these things. Immediately when depression comes, stand up and make yourself radioactive. Immediately when someone gives you some bad news, change it into good news. Say, "I see in that bad news a good side also."

If you can change such things, you are becoming a transformer, and you should be a transformer because the secret of life is adaptation.

The next step is to daily, for two or three minutes, sing. Sing anything beautiful for a few minutes, and you will see how it will change your nature. Immediately if you feel depressed or negative, jump into your shower and start singing as if nothing had happened, and you will feel so happy. A few minutes of singing changes your whole nature.

I remember a wonderful film, Zorba the Greek. In that film the man was very successful; then a flood came and took everything away. After everything was destroyed, he brought five or six people together and started dancing. The film showed that the human spirit is greater than any possession, that the spirit is the one who must grow.

The last step is to develop gratitude. We must be grateful not only to others, but also to ourselves. This one thing we overlook: we do not pay too much good attention to ourselves. We must be grateful that we are healthy. We must say to our body, "Thank you very much that you are helping me; you are so beautiful," just as we sit in our car and say, "My car, you are really good; I love you."

We must admire ourselves and be grateful to ourselves. We must be grateful for our talents, our intelligence, and our knowledge - because we are something. If we do not give value to ourselves, we will never give value to others.

Know your value. Know that you are really a precious human being. If you know your dignity and your value, you will never attack the dignity and value of others. Dignity is a sign of health in your emotional body.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1

Why can't we know our past lives?

Nature covers past lives for many reasons:

1. It prevents occupying a person with the past but instead enables him to forge toward the future, without being directly influenced by past events, relationships, and failures or defeats or victories.

2. It prevents the opening of sources of information that often cannot be stopped, thus making a person live in the past and forget about his present duties, responsibilities and problems. Past events can even explode in the mind of the person with tremendous tension, which sometimes releases him or sometimes leads him to asylums.

3. An Akashic Record contains hundreds of lives which may suddenly reach an individual and devastate his life with tremendous confusion, burning his sanity and balance,

4. Subconscious trash can surface, leading a person into total imbalance.

5. Such revelations can bring back the experiences of the past in such a reality that the person loses his present opportunity to live a new life.

Most of the forced revelations of past lives, fortunately, are unreal. They are the result of the imagination or the result of a projection of a medium, psychic, or hypnotist.

But this unreality may be accepted by a person as a reality which gradually orchestrates a life built upon unreality. In such a life, present seeds of many talents and opportunities are lost, and the person tries to obtain goals which are not planned for his life. This way the program put in this present incarnation is disturbed and mixed with an artificial program. The result is that the person is slowly led to insanity or various physical, emotional, and mental disorders.

If you play two video tapes on the screen of your television at the same time, you can imagine what happens. The same thing happens when a pseudo past life film is mixed with the events of the present life in the same brain.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma & Reincarnation, p.374-376

The Teaching creates reactions

In all departments of human endeavor, people react to those who bring new ideas, new visions, and new goals.

First of all, when someone speaks to us about the Teaching and about what the Teaching expects from us, we feel a reaction from our lower self. The reason for this reaction is that the crystallized habits, emotions, and thoughtforms feel that they are under attack. It is not easy to break our habits, our mechanical responses and reactions, our ways of thinking, not only because they are set in certain patterns but also because they are associated with our immediate families, churches, businesses, and traditions. Yet, nothing can change within us without changing all those things with which we are associated. This is often painful for ourselves and for others.

For example, the Teaching suggests that we not eat meat, drink alcohol, or smoke. When you decide to abstain from these things, your friends and family will probably wonder if you have lost your mind. This creates family and social problems, and sometimes in changing yourself you may lose your family, friends, and job. Sometimes you even lose your church, if the people in your church see that you are really entering the path of transformation. Thus we can see that the Teaching not only creates reactions from your lower self, from your habits, from your crystallized emotions, beliefs, traditions, and religions but also from your environment and everyone in it.

For an advanced human being, his family, group or society becomes like his lower self. Just as his lower self reacts to the Teaching, similarly and for almost the same reasons his family, group, and society attack and react to him.

-Torkom Saraydarian

The Ageless Wisdom, p.61

Inhalation and exhalation of the moon

During the waxing period, the moon acts as a vampire and sucks from the emotional sphere of the earth all elements of fear, anger, hatred, revenge, and greed. During its waning time, it exhales into the sphere of our planet these five elements, plus its own decaying particles.

During the waning time, people inhale the emotional pollution of the moon. This creates various tensions, pressures, and psychological disturbances in the masses. Actually, we feed the astral body of the moon and this extends its life span. If humanity enters the age of understanding and eliminates fear, anger, hatred, revenge, and greed, the disintegration of the astral body of the moon will be accelerated, and our planet will become free from such a polluting factor.

One day I was in a monastery and I was in a depressed mood, sitting on a rock and feeling blue. My Teacher came and whispered in my ear, "Do not feed the moon."

It took me long years to understand the meaning of his words. It was not the moon I was feeding, but its astral body. The food that we feed to the astral body of the moon is the same food it will feed us back, adding to its decomposed emanations.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol1, p.110

Busying ourselves with worldly activities is a form of laziness

From a Buddhist perspective, busying ourselves with worldly activities is a form of laziness, because we're lax in self-cultivation. Our lives are so busy in modern society: Our appointment books are completely full and we're always running here and there. We often complain there isn't enough time for the Dharma.

However, whenever we have a spare moment, we work overtime or call some friends to fill in the gap. We always have time to eat, but we hardly ever have time to nourish ourselves spiritually by attending Dharma classes or meditating. When the temple has entertainment and free meals, we go; but when there is meditation or lessons, we're busy.

This hindrance to spiritual progress comes because we're attached to worldly pleasures: food, money, reputation, amusement, and friends. The harm comes from our inappropriate way of relating to them. Attached, we selfishly indulge in them. However, these things in and of themselves aren't bad. Through pacifying our afflictions, we can enjoy these things with a good motivation--to improve ourselves for the benefit of others.

-Ven. Thubten Chodron

Taming the Mind

The pull of the full moon

When the moon is waxing, it is drawing millions and millions of tons of water toward the center of the oceans and seas. This is how the ebb comes into existence. What a powerful energy is exercised upon the waters of the earth by the moon.

If we had eyes to see, we would observe that not only is water drawn up but also gases, emotions, and thoughts are caught in the current of magnetism of the waxing phase of the moon.

Man is eighty percent liquid. It will be very interesting if one day scientists prove to us that during the waxing period of the moon not only are the bloodstream, the lymphatic system, the glands and their secretions under a heavy pull, but also the emotional body and mental body are drawn up toward the head and above the head.

During the full moon, dislocations of the subtle bodies are not uncommon. This is why people are excited, irritated, and sometimes irrational, aggressive, demanding, forceful, or "spaced" around the full moon. During the full moon period, various sicknesses related to certain glands increase.

In human relationships, there is more emotional tension during the waxing period than during the waning period. This can be noticed in schools, on freeways, and in various offices. We must remember, however, that every cycle can present an opportunity for us if we prepare for it and are watchful.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation, p.107,108

What is evil? Who is the enemy?

The enemy is any person or force which retards your evolution, growth, unfoldment, and beauty. There are five things that we can say about the enemy.

First, the enemy or evil is a force which makes you ugly. If any force makes you physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually ugly, then it is a dark force. You are yielding yourself and cooperating with it.

Second, if any force takes your goodwill from you and replaces it with evil, it is the enemy.

Third, if anyone or any impression or suggestion makes you fight against righteousness or forces you to be unrighteous, it is evil.

Fourth, if anyone or anything tries to take your joy away from you and load you with grief, fear, or depression, know that it is evil.

Lastly, if anyone or anything takes away your rights or freedom and tries to make you a slave or a hostage of his self-interest or beliefs, know that it is evil.

These forces are everywhere. Because they are everywhere, you are used to them and so you can no longer see them. They are even present in your food and water, in your churches, in your sacred literature. They have penetrated into all layers of human experience. If you are smart, you will develop the great sense of discrimination.

Discrimination means to know exactly which path leads to your destination and which path leads to your destruction.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Battling Dark Forces

How to unfold the chakras

We see that in every age people tried to introduce methods to unfold the chakras

1. by artificial means

2. by meditating upon them

3. through the process of meditation, purification, and expansion of consciousness

4. through initiations

The first two methods are considered very dangerous by certain Teachers. The third method is the safest method. The fourth method is exercised only by the Great Master, to meet certain planetary crises and prepare a certain number of people to handle the danger accumulating upon the planet.

The third, safest method is recommended in Ashrams and in true esoteric schools.

The artificial methods are hatha yoga, breathing exercises, certain exercises of will, and concentration upon the chakras. In far eastern countries, these are exercised with only failing results; but in western countries, because of our chaotic and polluted environment, such methods have very destructive effects.

Those who want to develop their chakras safely must lay a good foundation. When one carefully lives according to such a foundation, the rest will be easy. This foundation is built by

1. purity of life - physical, moral, and mental

2. sacrificial service - service to spread Beauty, Goodness, Righteousness, Joy, and Freedom

3. fearlessness - which is a state of consciousness not identified with material values

4. striving toward perfection - with one's deeds, words, expressions, creativity, thought, and communication

Striving is like having a purpose and making all possible efforts to reach that purpose, then making it a group, national, and global purpose. Without a purpose, even if the centers are open they will destroy you under their flooding currents.

The head center opens when you develop your willpower in trying to serve others and in overcoming problems and obstacles. It opens when you are striving toward a great vision and in the meantime meeting your duties and responsibilities and paying your karmic debts.

The ajna center unfolds through right thinking, in trying to be accurate in your thinking, speech, and expressions; in being simple, straightforward and discriminative of values; in having clear and right direction. When you fabricate or exercise wrong thinking or build wrong motives, you close this chakra. As much as possible, you must give right direction to your thoughts, your speech, and your actions.

The throat chakra unfolds as a result of your right speech, creativity, tolerance, silence, and purity in sex. Malice, slander, cursing, and swearing create blockages in this chakra. The throat chakra starts to unfold when you nourish it with your creativity and your Beauty, Goodness, Righteousness, Joy, and Freedom. Joy is the vitamin of the throat center. Malice, slander, lying, gossip, idle talk, swearing and cursing damage this center.

Love, inclusiveness, compassion, feelings of brotherhood, unity, wholeness, courage, and fearlessness - these are the elements which nourish your heart chakra. When the heart chakra opens, it becomes a door through which you pass into higher spheres of love and wisdom and eventually come in contact with the Great Ones. Hatred, revenge, and grief damage this center.

The higher solar plexus opens when you live a life of peace, serenity, sharing, forgiveness, renouncement, and humility. These are the virtues through which your solar plexus unfolds and makes available for you the higher psychic gifts, especially healing. These virtues are developed first by thinking about them and then by trying to actualize them in your life. Thinking and actualization are methods to expand your consciousness and unfold your centers. Jealousy, greed, fear, and hurry damage this center.

The sacral center can be unfolded by living a life of purity, occasional celibacy, and creativity, by controlling your sensual imagination, and by living a righteous life. The sex center is very sensitive to your actions. Every time your conscience does not approve of your actions, the sex center is disturbed. Many sexual problems are the result of living an unrighteous life.

The base of spine center unfolds and develops safely when one dedicates himself to a life of sacrificial service and striving, and when he works for freedom and makes it his life-aim to serve humanity. Anger, resentment, and hatred damage this center.

What happens when your chakras begin to unfold?

1. When the head center begins to unfold, you develop Soul contact. You start to be impressed by the "Center where the Will of God is known." You develop true leadership. You experience and demonstrate heroism. You liberate yourself from the domination of illusions. You feel bliss.

2. When the ajna center begins to unfold, you develop foresight, the sense of direction, and control over your personality and over destructive forces.

3. When the throat center begins to unfold, you develop discrimination and creativity. You become enlightened. You gain intellectual power. You feel joy.

4. When the heart center begins to unfold, you develop understanding and inclusiveness. You begin to register higher impressions. You reach the hearts of people. You attend Ashrams. You develop intense and inclusive love for all forms of life.

5. When the solar plexus begins to unfold, you develop healing power. You become sensitive to psychic energy and to the psychological conditions of human beings related to you. You develop astral consciousness.

6. When the sacral center begins to unfold, you create magnetism and healthy children. Your aura shines like a rainbow.

7. When the base of spine center begins to unfold, you develop illumination and at-one-ment with your spirit.

One begins to develop the sense of synthesis immediately when the threefold fire begins to fuse with the fire of spirit.

In the future, instead of prescribing chemical drugs, physicians will give patients certain forms of meditation to cure their physical ills. Most of our physical ills are the result of those actions which are harmful, separative, and ugly. Physical health depends upon moral health. The future physician will see that the patient strengthens his morality before he expects to be healed.

The unfoldment of the centers is related to our karma. Our karma is the result of how we used our thoughts, words, emotions, and bodies in the past. Unless the karma of our wrong actions, words, and thoughts is cleared, the development of the chakras may still go on but with many problems, pain, and suffering.

All progress in Nature must have the assistance of the Law of Karma.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1

Time is not limitless

Do not listen to those philosophers who say time is limitless and you can fool around as long as you want and eventually everything will be alright. Eventually everything will not be alright. You can be eliminated, totally evaporated and annihilated if you do not fulfill the time limit and reach the stage where you should have reached to pass the gate.

God gave you life. Carry that light, that torch until the end. Do not let any stupid things stop your progress.

A girl, who was a student, wrote that she cannot meditate because her boyfriend was fooling around. I asked her, "Don't you have greater interests than your boyfriend?" Your spiritual progress is of supreme value. You cannot sell your diamond for a stone. How precious you are. Unfortunately, all our television programs, newspapers, and books tell you, "How stupid you are, how nonsense you are, how valueless you are. You do not have value. What are you? Nothing. One bullet can kill you and you are finished." They put this trash in your mind and slowly, slowly you believe that you do not have value. That is why Christ said, "You are Gods." Look at what He is saying. He did not say that you are trash. He said, "You are Gods." When is that God going to manifest itself? How long will it take? Ask yourself every night, "Did I manifest my God today? Or was I really a monkey?" You find yourself and every day try again and again and again.

Do not give up because this is a chance for you. This life is a great chance for you. Save your time. Save your emotions. Save your money. Save everything so that you focus yourself on your spiritual progress. Do not depend on anybody else. Depend on your Inner Lord, and open your ears and eyes and listen, and let your Inner Lord guide you.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Dynamics of the Soul

Blending of energies and karma through sexual relationships

Q: Is it just in marriage that there is a blending of the energies, or is there an interchange in any sexual relationship?

A: If a person is promiscuous, he takes on the energies of his sexual partners. I am not saying that promiscuity is a transgression and that promiscuous people are going to hell. But chemically-combined results create different effects. Young people must be very careful about what they are doing. They must try to find the best partner and continue with him or her. Sexual promiscuity can change future incarnations. If a person is not a liberated human being and he has a lot of different sexual partners, he will have trouble with these people in future lives.

Sex is very important; we do not know how really beautiful it is. In sexual activity, one combines karmic conditions. You can be a very beautiful man, but you go with a girl who is karmically loaded. While driving home, a car hits you because you share her karma, even though you did not do anything bad.

We have all "mixed our waters," so to speak. Now what can we do? We can take vows of celibacy and dedicate all our energies, transmuting them to higher development and slowly clean ourselves, or we can find the best partner and say, "This is it." If a person is physically celibate, but mentally imagining, there is no progress. If he is really celibate, physically, emotionally and mentally, then he progresses. When St. Paul was asked whether it was good to marry or not, he said that if a person could do it, he should stay alone, but if he was boiling inside, he should marry. The person has to be the one to choose. No one else knows his own heart.

The opposite is also true. A boyfriend or girlfriend may help us advance ten thousand miles. Who can determine these things? It is better to take slow and careful action, so that you have time to think and observe and not hurry.

There is a great science of love - physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual love - which is not taught here. Most men and women do not know how to make love or what love is. They are producing children without knowing what they are doing. Sometimes they are forced; sometimes they are caught in a trap; sometimes there is no chance to escape. But this situation must end. In the future, we must have a university that will prepare men and women for sexual activity, marriage, and child-rearing. (See also Sex, Family, and the Woman in Society and Woman, Torch of the Future).

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma and Reincarnation

Regularity in meditation

The first labor to improve meditation is regularity in meditation. Many people do "rabbit" meditation. This is a symbolic way of saying that they are not stable or steady. One day they meditate; the next three days they do not. They start again, and then they stop.

If meditation is performed regularly, it expands your consciousness. Meditation is an effort to cast out limiting factors from your mind. If you are not regular, you cannot cast them out. If you are successful in pushing out the limiting factors, and then you stop meditating, they will return with stronger force, occupy your mind, and make it impossible for it to expand. Limiting factors are illusions, glamors, habits, hang-ups, and fanaticism, to name a few. Regular meditation clears these things.

In meditation you contact beautiful ideas or visions. But if you do not feed them regularly, they fade away. Every time you meditate, you nourish ideas that will bring more harmony and rhythm into the lives of all nations. Regular meditation keeps your highest visions, impressions, and inspirations alive.

Regular meditation builds subjective contacts between you and Higher Forces. Through regular meditation you refine your mind and gradually function on higher levels where creative forces exist. Creative forces are attracted to rhythm and harmony. Wherever there are rhythm and harmony, there are creative forces present which bring in more inspiration and fiery striving.

Creative forces are not interested in irregular, flickering lights. Such influences repel creative forces. This is why rhythmic and harmonious motions, invocations, singing, and dancing are performed in temples. Regularity, rhythm, and harmony attract Higher Forces.

If your meditation is not regular, cyclic, rhythmic, and harmonious, the Higher Forces know that you are not yet geared to the natural laws of rhythm, harmony, and cycles. Because of this, They consider contact with you to be dangerous to you and to those around you.

Regular meditation disciplines your bodies, your nervous system, heart, and brain. It disciplines your emotional body, and it makes your mental body focused, concentrated, awake, and creative.

When you forget to meditate for a few days, the old habits of your bodies return. Your emotional habits sneak in; your mind feels that it is time to be as it was before - scattered, unfocused, rebellious, and foggy. Then when you resume your meditation, you have a hard time because you must fight against the limitations of your bodies. Eventually you will give up under the pressure of your age-long habits.

Regular meditation helps your mind concentrate, focus, analyze, and synthesize without drifting. Regularity disciplines the mind. Regular meditation makes your etheric centers more receptive and sensitive to higher impressions. In regular meditation, you feed your centers with higher substances and charge their central fires. You create synchronization within the centers and between the centers. Sensitive centers receive and transmit more energy. Through energy, you serve; you keep yourself healthy and dynamic so that you are able to offer yourself for greater sacrificial service. Regular meditation builds a magnetic and protective sphere wherever you are doing your daily meditation, and you develop a magnetic aura which attracts the interest of the Great Ones Who can impress and reach you.

During meditation, your psychic energy flows out and accumulates in the place where you sit, in the walls around the spot you are sitting. Your lofty thoughts increase the beauty of the electromagnetic sphere which is building around your room. When you enter that room, you feel the power of the sphere. In this sphere, you can more easily contact creative forces which not only inspire you with great visions but also protect you from various attacks from mental and astral sources. This sphere requires regularity to build itself. Every time you forget to meditate, the sphere dissipates, melts away, and eventually evaporates.

Your sphere of energy is your temple. Energy spheres remain only when the Law of Compression is used or applied. Continuity creates compression and increases density because it exercises heavy pressure on existing spheres.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1

What is hell?

Two or three days later [after death] you enter the astral plane. The astral plane consists of two sections - the lower and higher sections. The lower astral plane is hell. Hell is a state of friction between the astral energy and your aura. If you participated in wrong speech, wrong thinking, wrong feeling, and wrong action you violated the laws of love, justice, beauty, goodness, and freedom. Because of this, you accumulated a lot of pollution in your astral aura, which is flammable material. The instant this material comes into friction with astral energy, a tremendous explosion of fire occurs, which is the origin of the idea of hell.

Hell is not reality, in a sense. But hell exists because you create it. Your astral body burns until all the pollution in it is totally melted, at which point your astral body either dies or releases itself from the pollution and enters the higher astral level. In the higher astral plane you see greater beauty, greater freedom and liberation to use Cosmic direction as your own will. At these first stages you do not control what you want to do. As you proceed, you gain more control over your time, direction, and activities.

The higher astral plane is occupied mostly by artists, humanitarians, and those who sacrificed their lives for others. It is here where you meet your teachers and guides. Your Solar Angel immediately appears to you. In the lower levels It watches you as you go through the "valley of tears," the "valley of gnashing teeth," but It does not contact you at that level.

In writing about these levels, the Great Sage says that Urusvati heard the lamentations and grinding of teeth coming from the lower astral plane. The inhabitants at this level really suffer not for punishment but because they created it. Their pollution contacts the fire of the astral plane and creates a hell for them.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma & Reincarnation

When animals die

Q: You said that animals incarnate again after only a few days. Is there anything special we can do for them?

A: Just send them your love. They will follow you astrally for three or four days; you can say, "Poochy, I love you. You are here, i feel you," and put out some dinner for him. Many advanced animals come back in different forms.

Q: Do they suffer when they die?

A: They go directly into their astral body and do not hurt like humans do. Humans have imagination, which makes them hurt more. Animals do not have this kind of imagination; they withdraw immediately to the astral plane. That is why if an animal breaks its leg it can sit for three or four days without making a sound. It is in the astral plane watching its body.

Q: Do animals take longer to incarnate if you killed the animal and it is mad at you? Can it bug you?

A: I think that killing animals is very bad because when you die they find you and really harass you. Can you imagine what will happen to butchers and the people who eat meat? They do not know what they are creating.

A scientist who kills three or four hundred monkeys has his astral body eaten day and night by the astral bodies of the monkeys. The Ten Commandments say, "Thou shalt not kill." But we kill: guns, bombs, war.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma & Reincarnation, p.296

How does grieving affect the departed one?

Q: How does grieving affect the departed one?

A: Any time you are grieved, really sad and depressed, they try to appear around you, to be around you. They feel very bad because they know they are immortal and see how stupid you are. But, because they love you, they miss their "plane" to the Higher Worlds because they are tied and limited by your grief.

When my Uncle, who was a very joyful and beautiful surgeon, passed away, my Father smiled and said, "He is released." I said, "Why are you laughing? He died!" My Father said, "It is good; he is released." Twenty-five people, with drums, flutes, and different instruments, went to his grave and danced for hours because he loved dancing. They dressed a man exactly like him and celebrated. When I asked my Father what was going on, he said, "He will be so happy! If you sent a man to the palace of the king, would you get depressed? So we are seeing him off."

We are brainwashed to such a degree that it is hard for us to think in these terms.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma & Reincarnation

A spiritual person is not a soft, jellylike person

Sometimes people think that the spiritual person is a soft, jellylike person who can fit into any condition without creating a noise. This is a false image of the spiritual person. On the contrary, the spiritual person is a fighter. He stands up and risks his life for the truth. He risks his life to protect the innocent. He fights against the spreading dangers of drugs, prostitution, and crime, as well as the misuse of the discoveries of science and technology. However, his fight is not to gain personal advantage or votes of popularity; it is a fight for the Common Good.

It is only a spiritual person who can stand against dark activities and help his fellowman enter the light. The spiritual person hates ugliness, crime, injustice, depression, and slavery. He does not hate them emotionally, but he sees in them the germs of decay and he fights like a physician to eliminate the germs, even trying to save those who have been contaminated by the germs.

A spiritual person opposes things such as drug dealers, prostitutes, hypocrites, those who exploit, those who work for organized crime..., but in the meantime he tries to gain their souls and to defeat the weaknesses of their personalities.

A spiritual person stands against darkness and tries to dispel it with his light. A spiritual person is always enlightened by the light of compassion, without losing his measures of righteousness.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation, vol.1

Conception, miscarriage, abortion

Q: Regarding miscarriage and abortion, at what point does life begin?

A: The moment conception takes place, the soul is there. When a man and woman have intercourse, their united aura creates a funnel at the head through which the baby's soul travels to the mother's womb and the seed begins to germinate.*

In esoteric books, abortion is condemned unless the mother's life is endangered because it violates a person who has worked very hard to leave the subtle planes to enter the womb. You are breaking the house that he is building for his survival.

Q: What about miscarriage?

A: Miscarriage can be karmic, or it can be a dark attack. For example, let us say that a masterpiece child is coming; the dark forces will attack and try to kill it. There are hundreds of cases in medical history where the mothers of very advanced human beings tried abortion but were unsuccessful. The dark forces attack the child through the mother because a soldier in the Army of Light is a danger to them, and they try to prevent his birth. There are powerful politics waging in astral and mental planes.

Remember that nothing happens by accident. One does not really know what is happening - whether miscarriage is karmic, self-created, or a dark attack.

The first three months in the womb the child is still in astral consciousness, developing the physical counterpart of the astral consciousness. During the third to fourth month, a time comes when the soul makes contact with the developing body. This is the moment of "quickening" in which a woman feels the movement of the child. Then in the remaining seven to nine months, the soul makes a connection with the mental and astral bodies, and then takes birth. He makes a connection with everything and then "lands" his instrument.

The process reverses in death.

Q: When an egg is fertilized by the sperm in vitro, when does the soul unite?

A: The moment they fuse. When the fertilized egg is transplanted into the woman, it grows there.

Q: The soul is present in the test tube?

A: You must know what kind of soul is present at this sort of procedure. If science continues, we will see many zombies walking the streets - without feeling. Why is marriage sacred? The marriage ceremony creates an etheric and auric atmosphere for coming children, with prayers, chanting, and blessings. When the prayers and the intention of the marriage partners are very high, a high-level frequency is created which attracts only high-level souls.

When a man and woman decide to have a child, they should spend several hours in meditation and prayer prior to intercourse, so that they attract a genius, a talent, a beautiful leader. This is why many religions forbid kidnapping a bride, or making a woman pregnant in a nightclub or motel. What happens in these instances is that the parents attract entities living on the etheric plane, who are mostly criminals or people trapped in vices. Sometimes they are victims of war who are full of tremendous anger, revenge, and hatred, the results of which fill our prisons.

Q: How do the dark forces know whether the incarnating soul is advanced or not?

A: The dark forces are more thorough than the FBI or the CIA. They have a "computing system" in the astral and mental planes. They can detect every movement. This is why in one of the schools in higher planes we are trained to keep our thoughts and emotions secret.

Any time a soul incarnates, their automatic registration shows them where. What is our protection? The White Lodge can disturb their instrumentation, if the incarnating one is really pure and under Its guidance. That is why we pray, "God protect us."

Q: Yet you say that nothing happens by accident, that it is karma.

A: Let us say that a very beautiful worker, a savior of men, is coming. The dark forces do not like this, especially if he is incarnating into a family and environment where all of his qualities will unfold and bloom. They will create everything possible to prevent his birth. If his karma is bad in certain aspects, they can harm him according to his karma. But if he is without karma and they attack, the White Lodge destroys them.

*See also Woman, Torch of the Future, and Sex, Family, and the Woman in Society for detailed discussion on marriage, sex, conception and family relations.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma & Reincarnation

The guidance of the Solar Angel

The Solar Angel is like your teacher, if you really give yourself to the Solar Angel. Let us say that I am your Solar Angel and I see that you are doing certain things that will limit you. I say, "Don't do that; do this instead; follow this line of work." You say, "I want to be a dancer. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a painter. I want to be President of the United Nations." So I say, "Take only one thing." You may hate me for it, but it is good for you.

The Solar Angel looks at the situation and sees that as a dancer you would die in a car accident on the way to a dance. He says, "Honey, I would like for you to be a dancer, but I do not want it." He does not explain why, but you must be a doctor because He sees that in that line of work you will develop.

If you listen to the impressions coming from the Solar Angel, it prevents future dangers on the Path. In the meantime, you feel as if you are being limited. He saves your life, and you think He is limiting you. This is why it is very important to develop communication with the Transpersonal Self, the Solar Angel.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Karma & Reincarnation

The goal of education

The goal of education is to eliminate all those hindrances which bring health problems, emotional problems, and stresses, mental problems, and social and global problems. Until now, our religious and academic education has not given us a safe world. It has not given us a future we can be proud of. It has not given us clear skies, clean water, or food uncontaminated by insecticides, poisons, and radiation. Education has not reduced or stopped the increase of crime all over the world. Education has not been able to uproot the causes of war, and so on.

If education is guilty of all these things, one wonders why, then, we spend billions of dollars all over the world just to employ teachers, build buildings, and try to teach a new generation of mankind. All men and women of higher vision are waiting to see a change in education. Change in education will not be accomplished by a change in machines or the increase of the number of computers, televisions, radios, tape recorders, video and sound equipment, etc. It will be a change in the goals of education.

The people of the world are paying so much money and spending so much time to see a better and safer world. Education can and must meet the problems of the world.

*******

What is the purpose of education? In a short and brief way we can say, "To lead every student to perfection to save the human race." This is the most practical and most magnetic formula for education.

Let us explain a few words in this formula:

1. Perfection means the best possible state and condition in which the student can physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually reveal his or her highest potentials.

2. To serve the human race. The goal of education has been built upon individual interests or upon national interest. This must change. Every student must know that all knowledge and talent must be used to lead humanity to perfection, toward the best health, happiness, success, cooperation, peace, freedom. The student must realize that the state of the whole humanity is the only foundation upon which can be based his future happiness and success.

There was a time when people were concerned only about their individual happiness. Then there came a time when people were concerned about their group success and happiness. Now every nation is concerned about its own success and happiness, but also this is the time in which people are realizing that such an understanding is outmoded and cannot contribute to the future.

Many millions of people are now seeing the reality that there is only one humanity, and every nation, every group, every individual is affected by the conditions in which humanity lives.

The new education will base all its curriculum upon this foundation: Humanity is one, and the sacred duty of every individual is to serve humanity in a way that leads human beings toward perfection. Such a vision will create miracles in the schools, and for the first time in millions of years education will serve its true purpose.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol.1.

Spiritual, moral and intellectual retardation

Most of the problems, pains, and sufferings in the world are caused by morally, spiritually, and intellectually retarded people. What are the sings of retardation?

Physical retardation is characterized by the incapacity of hands, feet, organs, and senses to accomplish efficient action; and brain damage manifests as lack of control over the physical mechanism.

Moral retardation appears as heartlessness, cruelty, lawlessness, hatred, anger, jealousy, revenge, greed, malice, slander, and harmful urges and drives.

Intellectual retardation appears as vanity, ego, self-deception, treason, separatism, selfishness, ignorance, fanaticism; inability to grasp the needs, demands and visions of the times, and crystallization of attitudes and viewpoints. An intellectually retarded person works like a tape recorder, he does not have his own thoughts. He cannot think.

Spiritual retardation manifests as lack of the power of synthesis. Those who are spiritually retarded cannot use abstract thinking; they cannot visualize; they cannot contact Higher Worlds; they cannot use their mental and higher senses. They live as materialists, negating any possibility of other values. They cannot grasp the existence of the One Self. They cannot strive toward unity. They cannot see any purpose behind the existing life.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Education as Transformation vol1, p.291

How to develop willpower

Those who like to live like slaves are called cattle or sheep because they do not have willpower. They do not have direction, but they follow the direction of their own glamors and illusions and the direction of the glamors and illusions of other people.

It is possible that man moves, desires, and thinks by the effect of external forces using his urges and drives, desires, glamors, illusion, prejudices, or superstitions. External forces appear in man as if they were his own free will.

People demonstrate strong urges and drives and powerful desires and force their body to take strenuous actions. People also demonstrate intense mental activities, forced by desires and urges and by other outside influences, giving the illusion that they are working with a strong willpower. The fact is that such people do not even have will energy in them, and they are victims of blind forces.

It is interesting to note that man for most of his life is like a machine, like a car which is driven by some other force. If you ask anybody on the street, "What are you doing?" he will say, "I am going here, there... I am talking about this or that... I am feeling this way, that way..." The reality is that the majority of people do not even exist. It is their bodies that are walking, directed by an emotion, thought, urge, or desire.

Stop any moment and ask yourself:

-Why am I doing this?

-For what reason?

-What is forcing me to do this?

-For whom am I working?

-Who is my boss?

-What is my purpose?

When you ask such questions, you will suddenly realize that you are really not the owner of your mechanism. Other thoughts, emotions, desires, and interests of outer agents are controlling your life, and in your innocence you are calling such a life your "own life."

Disciples are those individuals who cultivate willpower through a life of discipline. Once you commit yourself to a heavy discipline, you will see that willpower is really awakening within you and putting all your systems into order, into the right direction.

The Teacher makes you attack your self-pity, touchiness, hatreds, fears, jealousy, revenge, desires for revenge, greed, and sensitiveness because as long as you are infected with such maladies, the fire of the will cannot be awakened within you. It is only after freeing yourself from such pollution that you can feel the first rays of willpower within you.

The Teacher makes you face harder and harder conditions so that you cure yourself and bring out the spiritual essence hidden in you. Sometimes you do not even need to have a Teacher. A great beauty, a great idea, a great Teaching manifested by some powerful Individuality, such as Christ or Buddha, acts as a Teacher, as a direction. Once you dedicate yourself to such a direction, you will face a great challenge and you will submit yourself to a strict discipline.

******

There is only one willpower, one central powerhouse. The same electricity can run through all wires. To develop willpower means to tune your True Self to that powerhouse and make the flow of energy come and connect your True Self with the powerhouse. There is only One Will, the Will of the All-pervading Architect.

Surrendering your will to that realized Almighty Will is in fact an act of developing willpower. Until one resigns his physical, emotional, and mental "wills" for the One will, he will not find will within him and become one with the Almighty Will.

The path of renunciation is a process in which you leave your self-will, or free will, to gain the real will of your divine Self and fuse with the One Will. Every time you stop the process of your renunciation, you turn into a slave, no matter where you are found on the Path.

In its real sense, advancement is progressive renunciation of your separating self.

Those who run after their own tail in a life of luxury and a life dedicated solely to physical, emotional, and mental amusements and pleasures are called builders of their own prisons. They want to be prisoners for a long time. This is how one loses his willpower, his own divine heritage, and becomes body, urges, drives, desires, glamors, and illusions.

Will is developed in many different ways:

1. The first step is to engage yourself in responsible duty, task, or labor which is carried on as a service to others in the light of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth.

2. The next step is discriminative rejection of things that distract your divine direction.

3. The next step is accepting Beauty, living in Beauty, thinking in Beauty so that ugliness is rejected. Accepting Beauty, Goodness, and Truth makes you reject ugliness and ill will. As you increase in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, you manifest greater willpower.

4. The next step is to put all your heart, soul, and strength into the things you are doing, speaking, or thinking for Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. We call this a state of beingness when it is present in all your expressions and labor. This develops a great power of will because it calls forth your inner essence. To have willpower means to bring yourself into existence. You exist to the degree that you have willpower. Willpower makes you exist.

You exist not because your body exists; you exist not because your emotions and thoughts exist; but you exist because your will-to-be exists.

Every one of us must do the things we are doing with all our heart, soul, and might. It is through such a concentrated tension that the True Self, the divine Presence in the form of man, manifests Itself.

Things done without concentration, attention, and observation; things done without lovingness, dedication, and devotion; things done without direction cause disintegration within ourselves. Disintegration is a process of losing willpower. Integration is accumulation of willpower. A man of integrity is a man of willpower. That is why virtues are manifestations of willpower.

Focus is willpower when things are held in integrity. Focus is manifestation of integrity, manifestation of the Self in action, in thought, in direction.

Concentration is not focus. Focus is clear projection of the attained image of the essence. Concentration is the ability to sustain the direction of the essence in any field of activity.

Concentration is exercised in difficulties and in crises. Difficulties and crises develop your concentration to keep the flow of essence in the right direction.

All great Teachers come to earth to present a model of life of crises and difficulties and challenge us to engage ourselves in such a life. Their intention is to develop willpower within us which transcends all urges and mechanical reactions of the lower planes.

The real Teaching tells us to live a life of difficulty, labor, and crisis because it is after graduation from such a life that the real joy and bliss will manifest for us. Joy and bliss do not exist without a cultivated willpower.

If you do not have trouble, create it. But understand this statement in the right way. To create difficulties and crises means to set higher visions in front of yourself and strive to achieve them. A man of willpower does not escape from difficulties and crises because for him the joy and bliss are senses in overcoming the crises, difficulties, and problems. Willpower is gained on the path of victory, not in the cave of inertia.

Willpower is measured by the degree of self-mastery, joy, and renunciation.

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People sometimes think that when a man has willpower he can dominate the wills of others and make them his slaves. This is an error. True willpower does not enjoy creating slaves and dominating their will. On the contrary, true will is an agent of liberation and freedom. It is only those who have willpower who never try to dominate other people's will.

It is possible that a man of willpower is a king or a president or the commander of an army. But if this man has real willpower, he will use all his power to create peace, freedom, and creative joy.

It is fear that creates totalitarianism. Fear is the absence of spiritual will. Fear is the source of many crimes. Fear does not tolerate freedom but tries to make other people live the way it wants. Those who are limited to their self-interest cannot develop willpower. Willpower cannot survive in separate interests. Willpower is inclusive and universal.

-Torkom Saraydarian

The Mysteries of Willpower