To teach mortals that they stand out as individuals and yet when they learn themselves, they know all men, seems to be a paradox. It is not, it is a truth. You are functioning in these bodies to give to you certain expression for your soul’s on-going. When you have completed it, or when your body ceases to be of use, you leave it, you lay it down and it goes back into its own individual form, fundamental qualities which indeed are a part of the same great cosmic force that you are. It has a consciousness, it is made of millions of entities over which your great consciousness ruled during the time that you possessed it. Remember that your consciousness has been made of myriads of consciousnesses down through the ages and you have attained the position that you now hold and that the only difference between the least consciousness that you are capable of conceiving of, and the great Arch-angel is the degree of consciousness. That is the only difference: it is in the degree that you possess, that you bring forth, that you manifest. Therefore, when you are conscious of all about you, you are conscious of yourself and you are unconscious so long as everything about you is a mystery, so long as others are a mystery, so long as you do not know yourself you do not know another. Therefore, you know by that very symbol just how much you know yourself for just so can you gauge it. If you do not know another, if you criticize another, if he does not meet that which you think to be right, then you do not know yourself, and why do you not know yourself? Because you never know when you meet it yourself in your life, the same thing that another has done for which you have criticized him. That is why yon do not know yourself. If you knew yourself you could not criticize another for you would be honest with yourself and say, “I too am that one, or have been or will be perhaps. No doubt of it." We say perhaps because many of you are not conscious of that which you have done in earlier years, in this life. How could you know then of that which has transpired in another body many long ages ago, and yet the consciousness, that part of you which goes into eternity, carries with it its remembering, carries with it all its experience, its wisdom - there is none lost.

So when you see another one doing that which you disapprove of, which you would change, which you would teach him to be different in, you are seeing in that other one, yourself in a lesser degree or a greater degree, yet yourself. Remember, rather than criticize the other one, go back within yourself, say to yourself, “That is part of me, if I would change it in another one, I must begin now and change it within myself, for here is where the trouble lies. If I can see it in another one to criticize in another, here is where the seat of it is. If it is something that I dislike in another, here is my work - not to change the other one, that world is his, inherited by him, and inherited by me is my own work to do. If we all would do our work to the best of our abilities, the world would grow better fast.”

As it is, every one is reaching out of himself to criticize, to change, and very little is done at home, because of it, time apparently is wasted, and yet we see you mortals feeling that you are justified, feeling that you are capable, feeling that you attained to the position in life where you are judges of humanity. It is not a position that anyone should assume because when you judge humanity, you admit literally that you have done little in yourself, that all of this you would change in another, lies unchanged in yourself, lies there awaiting the time when you will return and change it, and when you reach the place that you are working on it, you are then too busy, too well occupied, to reach out into the world and train another. You are willing then to leave his duty to him, when the time comes that he will see it: for others have left you to do yours, until the time came when you changed it, for after all, you are the one who breathes for this body, you are the one who lives in this body, and by the same token you are the one to change all, for it lies within your own soul and is yours for you to remodel.

If mortals could but know that much time is wasted and the greatest sin that one can perform is to bring judgment down on another when he has not worked it out within himself. Think of your own lives. Some of you say, "Where shall I begin ?" We have just told you, begin on that which you see and dislike so much in another. It lies right at hand. When you reach the place where you feel there is no power, that it has no power over you, that it ceases to exist in your consciousness, that you cease to see it, you have no doubt overcome it, but when you yet can criticize it, you have not overcome because you can still see it and recognize it in another. It is still distasteful to you in another, therefore it is still within you and you are not conscious of the fact that it lies there within yourselves. Why? Because most of you have not lived lives to perfect it. If you know that you do not approve of it, then strengthen yourselves before the battle, not attempt to do it when the battle is on. Most of you mortals wait until the great test comes upon you before you seek to strengthen yourselves. But the time to do that is to prepare for it and to so train yourselves that it has no power over you. Then when it comes you are strong. It is not a test to you, you stand above it, you have overcome in the fact that you have faced it and you have permitted it to loose its power before the test comes, but it will come to prove to you whether you have overcome it or whether you just think you have overcome.

Remember that as long as you can say you have overcome, you feel sure, you think about it, talk about it - you have not overcome. When you reach the place that when you meet it, you could give it a glance of recognition but pass it on, place it out of your mind, know that it has no power by the very fact that it does not remain within, that it ceases to exist for you, then you have finished, but not until then because the denial of a thing is in fact the recognition of the existence of the thing. So when you deny it, you admit it, you hold it within yourself.

If all your lives could be utilized as a symbol you would waste no time by seeking to reach and to know the understanding that is yours, that you are seeking, that you came here to find. Hunt for it right within yourself and whenever others disqualify, do not reach your standard, so to speak, see to it that your own standard is a standard and not an assumed one, not a pretense, not an out-pouring of that which is for the world to see only, see that you live it, for when others seek to investigate they find as a rule a structure behind very much like your moving pictures - a beautiful front yet no backing. It is deplorable indeed that mortals can waste so many moments in building structures in their lives that are only so much waste material, that have cost so much pain, in sorrow, in trouble, even as your beautiful pictures are so expensive to produce and after all, none of them can be utilized for anything but for the purpose it is built, and that is to be seen from the front only, and when that is torn down by storm, then do you stand naked in your lack of wisdom, in your lack of understanding, in all that is worth while in life. Many of you have frittered away your time and begin to change only when the time comes that you feel that you are leaving your bodies, and see a panorama of your lives and recognize your lost moments and see that which you might have done but did not do, and all that you did do and how little it has availed.

It now is the time when you are in your zenith when you have all opportunity ahead of you, now is your opportunity to begin, now always will be the time when you do begin, so why not this moment as well as another moment? Why can you not see the interest on your investment now and this moment instead of a moment when it is too late to do that which you craved to do?

Symbols of life! Most of them only symbols, only sign-posts and many of you wrap yourselves around them and can go no further. Tear yourselves loose and go out into the universe, living your lives and being that which is your ideal, that which is yours to attain, that which you see within yourselves, not that which you see in another or that which another may see for you, but that which you see for yourself. - The Great Cosmic Pictures can never be complete until each mortal goes back and lives his life, not as others picture it, but as he sees it, as he pictures it, as it is a truth to him from within himself, not from the brain, for it is, “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” not as he thinketh in his brain, that is of little power and a know-ledge passes into nothingness because the brain is continually filled with something different out of which the soul can make all that it can silt through of the wheat from the chaff.