September 24th 1966
As a symbol and token of our love and our gratitude for your patience, we bring a peacock. Gorgeous and resplendent in all its glorious colouring and beauty. And we bring you this symbol because its whole make-up, everything it possesses, everything about it, lovely as it is, is perfectly natural. There are many who take the feathers from this magnificent bird to adorn their own bodies. But these adornments are not natural but are something added on, something superficial. And we want you to think of this symbol that we are bringing you, as a token of love. And although those that look at you and the thousands like you, pray in deep sincerity, and who try day by day to do their very best under the adverse circumstances and conditions, we would have you know that we see you as things of natural beauty.
Each thought, each prayer, each little sad twinge which you feel for someone in pain, someone old, someone afraid, each little thought lights up, as it were, the aura, and even the lovely colours of the peacocks tail, are not as lovely as the brightness and the colours which these thoughts bring into being.
And so often of late, we have witnessed the gray shadows the dull brown hues in the aura, which indicate to us that there is pain and discomfort in this or that part of the body. But these dark sombre colours come forth only from the physical, but that part which surrounds the head, that part which like the peacock's tail is in a circle, or fan-wise we should say, about the head, is made up of the colour created through the thoughts. Through the deeper movement of the soul. And we say that these things are a joy to look upon.
The peacock here is as a symbol of natural, unadorned beauty — its own splendour needing nothing added, unlike the borrowed feathers people take to decorate themselves. What the transcript actually praises is what it stands for: the aura's colour, generated by "each little thought”, each twinge of compassion for someone in pain, fear, or age — said to outshine even the peacock's tail. Bodily suffering shows in the aura too, but only as grey and dull, confined to the physical; what surrounds the head, fan-wise, like the tail itself, is made purely of thought and the "deeper movement of the soul" — untouched by whatever the body is going through.
The distinction drawn — natural beauty from within, against ornament added from without — echoes 1 Peter 3:3–4's counsel toward "the hidden man of the heart," an incorruptible beauty of spirit, rather than outward adorning. Here it's given a gentler, more visual form: proof that compassion itself has colour, and that a person in physical pain, praying and thinking of others regardless, is, in the very part that matters most, undimmed.
There's a second, quieter claim here too: pain is shown as leaving a real trace, located precisely where it sits in the body, visible in the aura's shadows even where the surface shows nothing — the body's suffering registering somewhere beyond the merely physical.