“Another one of the more classical forms of legendary literature which has been read by almost everyone in his growing up period are the tales of the Arabian Nights, such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the even more familiar, Aladdin and His Lamp, which goes something like this: Aladdin found an old lamp much tarnished from age and when he attempted to clean up the lamp, there materialized with the first rub a giant genie who became his slave. Now, a certain sorcerer learned about this happening and wishing to possess the lamp, resorted to a subterfuge. Taking up a lot of new shiny lamps and walking past Aladdin’s house, he cried out, “New lamps for old”, hoping that Aladdin would be stupid enough to bring out his old magical lamp with the attendant genie and trade it for an almost worthless new lamp.

Here again is another one of those strong moralizing lessons. Just as they have done in the past ages, everyone at the present time is constantly trading in his old and very valuable lamps for one of the new and worthless varieties — schemes which are constantly conjured up by the clever sorcerers who surround him on every side. There is deep within every human a magic lamp, a lamp of life, its wick untrimmed and only faintly burning. It is not beheld in the everyday life and as the ages pass and as each human lives life after life, so does his lamp of life remain hidden and gathers the tarnish of countless thousands of life’s vicissitudes.

Even in his present moments, he is constantly jeopardizing his lamp of life by trying to trade it with the next charlatan who passes his way. The ways and manners in which he is tempted are numerous. The temptations may be a new diet, a new political system, a different variation in his religion. An evangelist may pass his way and he will, in any of these moments, temporarily lay aside an opportunity to polish up his lamp of life, to trim its wick so that its flame may burn brightly. And thus he is repeatedly prevented from life to life in realizing the great and undreamed of potential power which the genie of knowledge and understanding would bring to him after he had removed the tarnish of ages from the lustrous inner surface; for surely does this genie always appear to those who so remove the tarnish and polish and trim their lamps — a great and powerful genie which is, in actual reality, their own personal development of the higher reaches and plateaus of their superconscious self.

And so the genie and the man become as one, their knowledge and power transporting them into higher regions of immortal life, which were formerly only visions of enchanted heavenly cities where life was lived completely freed from earthly taints, trials and tribulations. How tragic then does the vision of life become to any advanced individual who, from his spiritual world, looks down into the surging masses of humanity where, spawned in lust, nurtured in hypocracies, bigotries, hatreds and other emotional vicissitudes of earth life, they struggle through the intricate maze of their self-induced, superimposed idolatries, bigotries, systems and symbologies, not knowing that within themselves there is a magic lamp of life filled with the oil of Infinite Wisdom. And saturated in this oil is their wick of life which can only be lighted when this person determines for himself the proper progressive form of evolution, and a flame which can only be kept burning by constant trimming, wherein the burned and charred shreds of the past are removed by the sharp edge of introspection. And as the wick is so trimmed, so is the ever-apparent necessity to constantly levitate this terminating end into a higher atmosphere where it can burn even more brightly.

And so a fable has again been retold and its moralizing lesson uncovered. Even so does the fable of the past, in the many lives that each human has lived, also become a fantasy, an illusion, and as it remains so covered in ignorance, so does this past corrode into a poisonous verdigris tarnish, and wetted by tears brought forth by suffering and self-incrimination does its poison constantly seep into the present. Yes, even as a man sleeps in his supposed conscious reality, at that very moment he is being saturated in all forms of consciousness by this past.

The sorcerer, the charlatan is ever about you. He is the thousand clamoring voices of your earth life; he is the ever-present subterfuge. His voice is heard in the multiple excuses which you create for yourself in attempting to evade that inevitable day when you must more fully determine your own position to the Infinite. Nor can you escape this inevitable, for surely you created it. Each day, each hour, each act lived in your many material lives was the creation of this inevitable decision either to atrophy and drown yourself in the inexplicable complexities of the material life, the inane and inept repetitious servings of numerous idolatries, beliefs and superstitions — rather than to constructively form your life in all the basic inclusions of Infinite Creation, to live life as a progressive entity of evolution, a constructive person who is living beyond the confines of a vegetative earth life.

The choice is yours. The Infinite Intelligence is supremely wise, knowing as it does, that either the lack of such a constructive evolution or a full dedication to its cause and purpose will determine whether you will pass back into oblivion or into some future immortal life.”

Excerpt from Tempus Invictus