Each life we live is meant to be another step up the ladder of evolution. We pick up our life where we left off. However, everyone we had close karma with is not back at the same time we come back because of their own individual karmas. So, there are new personalities to deal with, but generally, the problems remain the same. It is like a child changing schools from time to time. We are fitted into a slot in life that will best fit our karmic pattern due to time, place and circumstance. The new personalities we are in contact with will present us with new karma because we have no previous frame of reference with these persons. So, each situation is hard due to lack of familiarity with the situation and persons in the situation. However, this is meant to be and this is how we grow; ever so slowly, but we do grow.

Somewhere along the way, during previous lives, we should have developed strength of character that helps us handle the new ongoing problems, or pictures, we are presented with. In order to assure our growth, we are never presented with a lesson in life greater than our ability to handle the lesson. So, our failure to learn is due to the wrong use and projection of our free will. Free will always gives us the freedom to choose to do or not to do. So, the choice is ours at all times and under all circumstances. Along with this, our basic nature is bliss. So, we are always searching for happiness in life. Unfortunately, due to faulty thinking, we seem to push happiness further and further away from ourselves, while at the same time the absence of happiness becomes more painful day by day. This is why, from time to time, we should take personal inventory of ourselves and see where we are headed. Then, if we determine we are not progressing in our daily effort, we should change our course of action because most likely we are not living our dharma.

Right action always feels right and wrong action does not feel right. Also, right action goes along relatively smoothly and wrong action goes in jerks and stops. Often we wonder how hard to pursue a course and if it is the right course for us. If we have a talent for what we are pursuing, and we are happy in the doing, and the results are satisfactory, then we can conclude that we must be following our dharma. As a lesson comes to us during the pursuit of our right dharma, and lessons do come, right dharma or not, we must master the lesson. Often when a hard lesson comes we believe we are not on the right track in life and along with abandoning the lesson we also abandon our dharma. Even though we are on the right track our karma often fools us, and due to the pressure of the lesson, we abandon the whole ship and seek escape. Then, what we discover is that there is no escape, because the lesson continues to pursue us no matter where we go. Generally, people who live peaceful, happy lives are people who have a habit of living their dharma and who do not create unnecessary problems for themselves. They live on the side of good karma and not on the side of bad karma. They reason out their lessons and solve them as they go. So, their lessons are not as hard as the lessons others have. Life can be made easy if we recognize at all times that we are responsible and that we are held to account for what we say, think and do.

Another great problem in life is the habit patterns that we have created for ourselves over a series of lifetimes. Habit patterns are so easy to create and so hard to change. We are born with a fully developed habit pattern, created by our sloppy thinking and our poor attitude towards life and all others in life; an attitude that says, I will get mine and the devil can have the hindmost. Yet, the devil always comes out ahead in such an attitude and we get the hindmost. While he is eating the chicken, we will be eating the feathers. So, our life is what our attitude dictates it to be. One change of attitude can automatically change one hundred bad habits.

The lower the consciousness the greater the margin of error and the more dogmatic one is, that is, less receptive to higher knowledge. Such a person has no insight, usually just hindsight. However, with growth this slowly changes for the better. Also, it is true that one has all eternity to evolve.

One should always have an objective in life, that is, a positive, constructive objective that helps one to evolve, because human evolution is what life is all about. Those who evolve the fastest do so through constructive service to humanity. The idea is to help others up the ladder and not to step on their heads as they try to ascend the ladder. So, this is a lesson world and we are meant to learn by lessons, that is, to live in life until we outlive life. People who have good karma and live the good life earned that karma; they are enjoying the fruits in this life as a result of their good labor in past lives. The average life runs alternately, smoothly and then some roughness, which is a balancing out of karma.

The term used for many ages, which is true, is that at the end of our life we go to our rest; this life can only be endured just so long. As we age we go through stages from activity towards rest: in youth, great activity; in adulthood, activity with projected meaning (a planned existence); and in later life, less and less activity, but greater and greater reflection on the past - a time to review our life and to see our mistakes, a time to see where we hurt others and to ask for forgiveness, a time to bind ourselves closer to God, and because of the long memory that has now become very clear, to help youth gain a clearer understanding of the meaning of life.

An initiate who, in this life, has stepped onto the path of liberation, also has many problems to deal with: a lower self that does not wish to surrender to the higher Self, so it sets up many reasons not to proceed on the path; a poorly prepared body that has a hard time accepting the degree of purity now being introduced into it; and also, the great quantity of contamination in the subconscious now being brought to the surface, perhaps causing great distress. However, as initiates, we have the advantage of being able to experience God. And with devotion to our practice and with our gaze fixed on the all encompassing light of the Almighty Father we will reach the goal of life. For, while the ladder of life is anchored in this temporal world, the top of the ladder reaches into the eternal world. When we reach the top, we discover we are also the eternal light, and our long, long journey through the blackness of the unknown has ended. We are fully conscious for all eternity.