Dara Eklund USA
Dara lecturing at Olcott, Wheaton in 2012
The most acute loneliness one can experience is estrangement from one's True Self. We are burdened with a sense of loss or dejection when that inner Voice or Presence is not heard or felt. Some call it Conscience. I have heard a depressed friend once pronounce, "I have no conscience." He meant that he had not awakened his own conscience. Therefore, he could not recognize it in others. Yet, even a hardened criminal has a spark of nobility. Gottfried de Purucker once declared in a Lecture of July 22, 1930:
Conscience is the working of your spiritual being, a spiritual manifestation of the inner god of you, managing to send some faint gleams of light and truth and harmony and love into the poor, heavy, material brain-mind in which most men live and suffer and die.
Krishna states in THE BHAGAVAD GITA (V, 42):
Assimilation with the Supreme Spirit is on both sides of death for those who are free from desire and anger, temperate, of thoughts restrained: and who are acquainted with the true Self.
It is on the mental plane that we must restore the balance. By restraining thoughts and desires which oppress the brain mind, we allow streams of light from the Real within to replace them.
In a lecture of July 15, 1930, G. de Purucker gave an example of many whose conscience is not yet awakened in a poem about a stone:
I wish I were a little rock
A-settin' on a hill,
A-doin' nothing all the day
But jest a-settin' still.
I wouldn't eat,
I wouldn't sleep.
I wouldn't even wash --
I'd jest set still a thousand years
And rest myself, by gosh!
G. de Purucker constantly urged us to get off our duffs and become aware of our Godhood. Once awake, we can no longer live the wasted life. In fact, it is our bounden duty to share the light with others. We are not guards, but custodians of truth. This does not mean to "cast your pearls before swine," but it does mean a courageous declaration of truth. Far too many of us compromise our statements of Theosophy, either due to the prevalent influence of the God idea (denied emphatically in Mahatma Letter #10), social or political correctness, or fear of criticism.
In the end, we can either take with us courage and peace from a life well-lived, a lifetime of seeking virtue in a world of moral compromise and decay, or we can take with us the opposite, a record of unrealized aspirations, dreams and goals -- in short, a wasted life.