August 9th 1967
[Life] …. is but a very short time. Maximum and minimum. Joy and pain. Happiness and unhappiness. Human love and hate. Height and breadth. All these things do not exist in the realm of truth. But through all these pairs of opposites there is a golden thread. And hanging on this thread of life, of love, are all these things appertaining to human nature and the things of your human world.
And we want to bring to your minds once again, the thoughts which we have often planted there. But at times it is good to renew them, especially at times when you are surrounded with a little more sadness, a little more pain, a little more sorrow, whether it be concerning your very selves or those around you. It is this. That happiness and the seeker after happiness, the one who is constantly longing to be in this state, must be unhappy. They must be filled at this time whilst they are craving for happiness full of the opposite sensation, and this is all it is in very truth.
Sensation, something appertaining to the senses. And because there is no such thing as the opposites, and you will understand this because you have learned a little concerning to Maya and the things appertaining to the sense world. And the man who learns not to crave for so-called human happiness, not to want this and to want that, does away with it's opposite which is unhappiness. When the craving and the desire for so-called events, so-called circumstances, so-called occurrences, which bring sensible pleasure, pleasure to the senses, ceases, then unhappiness must perish also. For it is all one. It is all one.
But the real runs through the higher self, the golden indestructible thread, and for the one who seeks, gradually, on by one, these false, unreal, imitations will fall away. And you might ask, "How does one realise, and how can one break up and get rid of this corrosion, this weight of falsity and unreality?"
Little children, there is only one way. There is only one way. And it is the same way that has been taught by all the great ones. And even on the natural level, your doctors of the mind, and your physicians, and your healers of the human body, all tell you to relax. Not to worry. But the great spiritual masters, using different phraseology, said exactly the same thing. "Be still. Be at peace. Know thyself. Know thyself, and to thine own self be true."
But although this stillness only takes but a few seconds of time to talk about, be still, be at peace, be quiet, relax, don't worry, and yet to the true seeker, seeking along the right path, into the right sphere, for knowledge, it can take a whole life-time. Because it is inevitable, it is inevitable that no these corrosions, these unrealities, these pairs of opposites, pain, joy, sorrow, happiness, misery, release, hope and despair, must be experienced and not only experienced but recognised for what they are, before the realisation of the golden thread in one's own being can be recognised and known. Until all these things can be thrown out the thread cannot be seen. And this is training.
Now you understand and you are aware that anything that perishes, is not real, cannot last for ever. And so many people everywhere, all the time, are thinking in terms of the physical, and of their own, human, body. They are thinking continually, their whole life is centred on some-thing that will pass away, which will decay, and rot, and become even as the Earth.
Do you see where we are leading your thoughts? We are asking you not, again we are asking you to recognise not only the pains of your own body, and the tribulations which beset you in your own, immediate circle, but the tribulations and the pains of others. You are certain that they will pass away, even as you are certain that the body will pass away. But you are also certain of the golden thread on which these things hang. Others see not. They are suffering from an illusion.
And when you think on this colossal truth for but one moment, you will feel the weight of the pain and the fear and you will know and understand how sometimes you yourself feel that the golden thread will break, and that your whole world will collapse around you. And if you can feel like this, if you can go into the depths of depression which we understand and know about, try if you can to imagine for a fleeting second, the thoughts, the torment in the mind of the truly ignorant.
And now we ask you to set your sights anew. And to look over and beyond and through the fog. And to be strong, and to gather the courage, and to recognise things for what they are. And if you can say to yourself from the very bottom of your own heart, in this case and in that I did my best, then be at peace. For the golden thread runs through all things, through all people, through all life. So what is there to worry about. Were the great ones fools who continually said, "Peace, be still. Be quiet?" Were they talking at random? Did they not know what they were talking about? And each and every one said exactly the same thing.
And we end with the words, "Let not your heart be troubled”.
This transcript makes a demanding claim: happiness and unhappiness are not opposites in real conflict but two faces of the same craving — "the seeker after happiness... must be unhappy," since wanting one sensation necessarily carries the risk, and often the fact, of its opposite. The way out isn't achieving happiness but ceasing to crave sensation at all: "when the craving... ceases, then unhappiness must perish also. For it is all one." This draws directly on Maya, already named in the transcript itself — the Vedantic concept of the world of sense and appearance as illusion, or more precisely, mistaken for ultimate reality when it is not.
Running through all these pairs — joy and pain, hope and despair, height and breadth — is what this collection has called, since its earliest transcripts, the golden thread: the one real, indestructible thing, obscured rather than removed by every opposite hung upon it. What clears the obscuring, the transcript insists, is not effort or achievement but the plainest possible instruction, found, in one phrasing or another, "in all the great ones" — be still, know thyself, relax, don't worry — deceptively simple to state and, the transcript admits candidly, sometimes the work of an entire lifetime to actually live.
Its most honest passage acknowledges that even someone who understands all this can still feel, in real depression, as though "the golden thread will break, and your whole world will collapse" — the teaching doesn't claim to abolish that feeling, only to set beside it a truth stronger than the feeling: that pain and unhappiness, however consuming in the moment, are certain to pass, exactly as the body itself will. What's asked, in the end, is modest — not perfection, but simply, "in this case and in that, I did my best" — which the transcript treats as sufficient grounds for peace.