=kit028.txt

KIT 28 - Perfume of the Rose

It has been a summer of intense activities, very exciting! I had
reservations about personal adulations - for my 70th birthday
celebration - that might spoil my ego but what I found by
accepting the happening graciously was that I was giving many
people an opportunity of expressing their love and an opportunity
for me to reciprocate it a hundred-fold. I realize that this gift
of love of so many launches me into a new lease on life in the
service of The Message.

By practicing the B-Minor Mass of Bach, we are somewhat on the way
to the performance in the year 2,000. We are grateful to him for
opening the doors to the heavens by using the language of music.

The two plays presented at the celebration - one written by me at
age 15 and one written by Michael Seraphiel (now Zia) shattered a
sensitive fiber in the core of my being because they embodied so
dramatically the concerns, ideals and challenges of those
dedicated to a spiritual ideal! History repeats itself. One We
could have added Pir-O-Murshid's play, "The Living Dead." The
traditional way was either that of the sannyasin or that of the
householder; today it is being in the world but not of the world.
But the specter of the tradition hovers in the unconscious
indelibly; it needs to be overcome by exploring the spirituality
of the future.

Yesterday's journey of the pilgrim to the pinnacles of splendor in
the solitude of unity or the glory of the heavens becomes today's
laborer in the fields of the earth or the knight on the
battlefield of our commonplace existences embued with a passion
for excellence. One brings heaven on earth by handling ugly
situations beautifully rather than escaping into a utopic no-man's
land of bliss. Make God a reality. But is it not permitted
sometimes, to suspend the strife to spend a chosen moment in
beatific music? By emphasizing the God manifest in the divinity of
our being, the glance behind our consciousness, and the background
of our personality, are we not missing the uplift triggered off by
the hunch of that aspect of God that is beyond any manifested
expression whatsoever? Capture this moment between moments which
passes before one has noticed it, when you have ceased to try to
achieve to be. It is like the perfume of the rose that does not
seem to have a utility, a kind of bonus, the divine grace.
    
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