Everyone places value on something and most everyone places great value on life, but for very different reasons. So, the most important thing is what our values are and the priority we give to those values. Some only place value on one or two things in life, while others place value on many things and often too many things, some being of very little value. It is important to place value on things that have real meaning. So many things we think have so much value only have a transient value, and we overlook the things of real and lasting value. There are false values and real values and the thing is to know which is which, since this has a tremendous effect on our lives. As an example, the only thing some people place any value on is sports and when one is caught up in this, to the exclusion of most everything else, this becomes a false pursuit. We should always place great value on what is valuable.

So what is valuable? That which helps us to grow is of great value. That which accentuates spiritual growth is of utmost value. So, false values are those things that do not lead us upward, or help us to establish our own integrity and to grow. Life has always had greater plans for humanity than humanity has had for itself.

Throughout the history of humanity the high, low and medium have manifested. The high means those of higher consciousness who have come into the awareness of the sacred destiny of humans and as a result have insight into truth. Hence, they serve as an inspiration and as guides to medium society, and the mass or medium society serves as guides to the more primitive society. As a result the purpose of evolution is served.

There are, from time to time, highly evolved souls endowed with powers and wisdom who take birth upon this earth in order to serve as living inspirations and as guides to the seekers of this world. This has always been so and always will be. The more primitive of human society as a whole are like children and must be guided with love and firmness and controlled discipline and not conquered and forced to live in fear. The great travesty of humanity is that we are created in the image and likeness of God, yet we destroy each other, and this is a contradiction to the very essence of our creation. We must learn to live in peace and in love and to help each other and not continue to kill each other individually or on a mass scale. This is one of the main reasons why it is so important that we embrace real and not false values in life.

Greed is a false value and as Rudyard Kipling said, “For heathen heart that puts her trust in reeking tube and iron shard, all valiant dust that builds on dust.” There can be no future for us in greed. Greed assures the senseless end of the grand and noble plan of life. For small-minded, short-sighted people there are small values and for far-sighted people there are intrinsic values.

People must be educated into true values; as they grow so should their values. Often we are tested in the fire of life to see if our values are truly integrated into our psyches, and if they are, they will survive any test given to us. Our life here on earth is one part of a great plan for our eventual eternal life. When we prepare for our earth life we are consumed with the importance of our destiny. But then, when we arrive as babies and grow as small children we are often indoctrinated into many false concepts that have a tendency to lead us astray and thwart the real intent of our tenure on this earth. As long as we seek the solution to life in the illusion of life we will continue to struggle against the real meaning and solution of life.

The wise, the integrated, have outgrown the false illusions of life. It is the mass preponderance of humanity, who is caught up in the illusions of life and lives accordingly.

One of the greatest things in life is friendship, but because one cannot establish his own integrity within himself he believes that no one else has any integrity, so friendship is not offered nor is it taken. A peculiar quirk of the human mind is that if one feels no friendship with others, he believes all others feel the same way. So what we project out in life we receive the same back. So, somewhere we must start to believe in the higher principles of life. We must turn away from a fear-driven madness and turn to God and to our inner resources in order to re-educate ourselves into the reality of life and its eternal values.

Most of us start out in life with a firm belief in integrity, but somewhere along the way we submit to compromises due to what we feel is too great a pressure exerted upon us. We depart from honesty and embark upon a new and lower set of moral values. We corrupt our personal integrity. We become guilt-ridden and our conscience bothers us. To find relief from the pressures of our conscience we begin to justify our lack of integrity.

One thing wrong in society today is the need so many youths have for peer acceptance. As a result they drift into alcohol, drugs, sex abuse, and so forth. Then, all the values that were initially instilled in them disappear. There are many values we should have as an integrated part of ourselves as we go through life.

Skills are values that we should acquire to make life easier for us. In acquiring a skill in a profession, as an example, it should be for the purpose of service and not for the purpose of a good income. Hence, the right and wrong values are evident in everything we do. Creativity is a great and needed skill in this world, but it only comes when we create a clear channel to the higher mind and this requires integration of the Self.

Also, we should accept personal discipline as a much needed value in life, because we must ultimately become self-disciplined and we cannot hope to discipline others unless we have acquired mastery over our own self.

Another great and necessary value in life is a cultured heart. We need to soften the heart that has become progressively hardened through the ages. The heart has become hardened because we have long believed we were an island unto ourselves and that we had to stand alone against the world. Yet, our selfishness alone has caused a great hardening of the heart and now we find that this is a false premise. As a result, we have become meditators and our meditation is softening our hearts and we are slowly turning from selfishness to selflessness, from anger and rage to love.

However, the greatest value we can acquire is integration; to merge ourselves into the Self and to find ourselves immersed in bliss and in the continuity of the oneness of unity with God. The drop has at long last returned to the ocean from whence it came and lo the drop has become the ocean; all values of life have merged into one value and that is Brahman.