August 18th 1970
Come up higher, into the quiet secluded regions of the mind. That place where we can reach you, and talk to you, and bring to you the harmony and the peace of the Spirit.
There are, it is true, dark clouds encircling the Earth at this moment of time caused by the great enemies of God and love, ignorance and fear. And those two evils breed themselves, create themselves again and again through the stiff-neckedness, through the slothfulness, through the laziness of men who will not, who refuse, to think. Men who insist on sleeping in the midst of life, the sleep of death. Who refuse to waken to reality, to life, and to love. But thou hast the staff which will help you as you walk, as it were, along the unholy ground, through the bog, through the swamp of ignorance and fear which is all around you.
You have the staff of knowledge. This is a great thought. The staff of life, the staff of life. Remember the words?
“Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me, they comfort me."
All around you, you listen to the conversations of the little children, who are still in the dream state, Spiritually their hands are empty and they walk on hot coals, waving their arms about, unable to keep their balance, for they have no staff, nothing to lean on, they have not knowledge. Therefore they cannot have wisdom or understanding. So although at this time of your completing your Earth experience, we want you to lean more heavily upon this staff, of knowledge, of wisdom, of understanding, and to recognise the darkness for what it is, lack of light. But we want you to (know) that all those elder children who have the staff within their grasp, to be aware of, and to know, that they also have the light. And they cannot help but shed this light wherever they go. For the staff of knowledge always brings with it the glow, the gleam, of the light of love. And we want you to take comfort from this knowledge, and from the knowledge of this light. And although the little ones that sleep and struggle, the unbalanced, the imperfect, the crying children, for this is all they are, crying for this, wailing for that, gnashing their teeth because they feel that they have been deprived. They know not, they know not, that love is all around them, longing to save them, to lift them up. It's fingers would open their eyes and their hearts and their minds, but because they are children of the creator, these things cannot be forced upon them. But these feel the light that flows from thee, and they know there is something beyond their ken. And we know, and we are ever watchful, waiting for the beam, for the light of your own soul, to touch this one and that. When this happens we are ready and waiting, and there is not one day that passes, not one day….
This transcript takes the familiar image of shepherd's staff from Psalm 23 — "thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me" — and gives it a specific, functional meaning: the staff is knowledge, and knowledge alone is what allows someone to walk steadily through "the bog, through the swamp of ignorance and fear." Without it, others are pictured as children walking on hot coals, "waving their arms about, unable to keep their balance" — not wicked, only unequipped, having "nothing to lean on."
Its central reassurance addresses someone nearing the end of life directly: lean more heavily, not less, on this staff as strength fails elsewhere, because the staff itself cannot help producing light — "the staff of knowledge always brings with it the glow, the gleam, of the light of love." This isn't something achieved separately from carrying knowledge steadily; it's described as an automatic consequence of it, whether or not the one carrying it is trying to shine.
The transcript's gentlest move is toward those still struggling, still unbalanced, refusing to wake: they are named plainly as "crying children," not condemned for their fear but understood by it, "gnashing their teeth because they feel that they have been deprived" of something they cannot yet see is actually near them. What they sense, without understanding, is the light coming from someone else's own staff — and the transcript closes on quiet, watchful readiness, waiting specifically for that light to reach one more of them, "not one day passes" without this attention being paid.