Rosicrucian Writings Online


The Imperator's Monthly Message

[By H. Spencer Lewis]
 
[From The Mystic Triangle April 1928]
 
 
Ten years ago this month I made my first trip around America to visit every Grand Lodge of our Order in the United States. I shall never forget the day I started from New York on my way southward. It was cold and stormy and the prospects of a delightful trip were mild indeed. Yet I was soon in a warmer climate and each day brought me closer to the south, then to the west, and finally into California, the beautiful sunshine land of the western world.
 
I have often thought of that trip, especially since living in this Valley of Heart's Desire, as they call this Santa Clara Valley of California, now filled with blossoms on every kind of fruit tree and with air just rich with fragrant perfume. For, the transition from the cold and snow of the East to the warmth and joyous beauty of the West was like a rebirth into a new world,--like starting life over again.
 
How many times in a lifetime we really can start our lives over! Each day can be a new day and a new life, if we choose to make it so. Each year can be a new year in a new world, if we wish it so.
 
We, as Rosicrucians, stand now at the threshold of a new Rosicrucian year. For the organization, it is filled with startling possibilities and momentous activities. For our members, the year is filled with glorious opportunities, and as I have said to those to whom I send birthday greetings, certain wonderful things are decreed and shall come to pass. The most wonderful things, however, for the coming year, are those things now dormant and awaiting the magic touch of your will power. You can start these into action, electrify them into manifestation, by touching the button of your determination and sending a current of power into them.
 
Each day, each year, each lifetime, is precisely what we make it. A man is precisely what he thinks he is, not because he thinks it, but because his thinking will affect his actions and these in turn will affect his life.
 
Barnum the great showman, used to say that people love to be fooled. Man fools himself more than he is fooled by anyone else. We love the tinsel of life, the noise and the glamor, the bright lights and gayety, and under cover of color and sheen many crude and unrefined things appear to be considerably different from what they are. I heard a little boy say that when he went on a trip to Alaska and saw the marvelous totem poles erected there long ago by the Indians, he wanted one, and finally bought a miniature one from an Indian souvenir stand in some shop. It was guaranteed to be a handmade, hand-painted totem pole, made by the Alaska Indians. He took it home with him to the United States and valued it for a year, until one day he loosened a part of the bottom of the pole and read the words "Made in Japan." It broke his heart and he cast it aside.
 
Many of us value things for the material conditions we give to them or believe they have. We give potency and power to the things which have neither. They serve us in our ignorance and then we find, someday, that they are useless--yet not one bit different than they were when we valued them. Life itself may become a talisman, an amulet, through some false value we place on it, while we overlook its real value and usefulness. Let us start each day as a new beginning, seeing things differently, and better than we saw them before: with higher ideals, higher motives and higher thinking.
 
In this way we will make our lives what we wish them to be and we will find that we have passed through a transition, a change, from the unreal into the reality.
   

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