One of the daily tasks performed here at the Center is the reading and answering the numerous letters which come to us from those who would aspire to a better way; yet, hardly a task, for it is more often that we joyously read of wondrous happenings.

With all this, however, there is reflected in these letters, the rising and receding tides of emotionalism and desire, defeat and victory in personal conflicts; and in seeing all of these things, I am often reminded of an incident which took place nearly two thousand years ago, a scene depicted as the Last Supper, a time when the Nazarene sat with His twelve disciples and shared with them the symbolic bread and wine. And as this was done, He spoke of one among them who was a traitor and who would soon betray Him to the high priests.

So it is, as I read your letters and watch the conduct of your lives, I know also there is a traitor. For in UN.AR.I.U.S. we are indeed sharing together the last earthly supper. We are breaking the bread which destroys the symbolic earth life. We are drinking the cup of Immortality; and as we do this, history may well again be repeating itself, for as I look into your faces, I again see the traitor.

No, he is not called Judas Iscariot, but is called the ‘Old Self’ and he is not one among you — but is a part of each and every one. He will not betray me, or UN.AR.I.U.S., or the Infinite, but it is you he betrays. He does this not once but hundreds of times each day; countless thousands of times in the years of your life. And each time he betrays you, he will deliver you up to the high priests of the underworld.

“And how does he betray me?” you may ask. Through the countless thousands of incidents of daily life, their importance to you, their ability to mandate paramount importance, the way they constantly knead you in emotional reactions. These are all betrayals sponsored and fostered by the ‘old self’, the person you once were years ago, or in any lifetime and in hundreds of lives. You would not know this betrayer if you saw him, for he is the sum and substance of what you call life — the material life you live from day to day.

Yes, even in death he will betray you, for this death, too, must be relived to justify and compromise the betrayer; and even as you utter your first wail as a newborn infant in some future life, you have again surrendered to the betrayer. Yes, you will continue to live and to be constantly betrayed until you learn to recognize the betrayer.

You must cast upon him the Light of Immortal Wisdom which will bring his countenance into your vision, in all its stark ugly reality; for this Wisdom Light will also show you many other things, a background of Immortal Life lived without the ever present betrayer, lived in constructive reality which harmonizes and unifies all thought and action, without the emotional drive which now makes your earth life possible.

How well you will learn of this betrayer is your personal problem. Do not sleep as did Peter in the dawn of a Gethsemane, for the cock has crowed thrice. The betrayer may well be ‘delivering you up’ in your last crucifixion, one in which you cannot hope — as you are hoping — that an Angel will roll away the stone from your tomb. For surely has this stone been rolled away many times, yet with each rolling you are all the weaker for not having participated.

As it is with all things, Angels, too, have their limitations, not that they are limited as Angels, but in the limitations they find in helping others who would like to become Angels, yet have neither the strength nor fortitude to extricate themselves from their earthly mire. For indeed this mire can be as quicksand, sucking the poor unfortunate into its depths with each struggle. How best then, can this emancipation be achieved? How can one extricate himself from the quicksands of the material life? Only as it has been so often said: freeing one’s self from such mire is cleansing the mind and psychic anatomy from the importance of the material life; for so long as it supersedes in its importance, over other desires and aspirations, so will it cling and grasp and hold.

And in each struggle against it, do not relinquish, even for a brief moment, for you will surely be sucked deeper into it with each surrender. For the material life as it is lived by you or any earth man is, in itself and in its quantitative expression, the supersedence of power which every earthly act of living intensifies as it is so lived in its primary importance.

Only in Infinite Wisdom, the knowledge and desire of a higher life and all things pertaining to this Wisdom, will you find a way to free yourself from your betrayer, and the quicksand of your material life. For Infinite Wisdom will reach out through this blackness to the place of your struggling, and you will be able to grasp it; and when so grasped in complete dedication, your faith will then lend to it its mighty strength to lift you from your earthly mire and you will leave the shadow of your betrayer enmeshed therein forever.

Excerpt from Tempus Procedium