Collected from TT, by Annegret Liebig,

Dear Temple-sisters and –brothers, dear friends,

This month the term EFFORT found response in my mind. We all are well known with the fact, that most of our conscious life consists of small and big EFFORTS to do or avoid something.

Sometimes our EFFORTS are crowned with success, but at least just as often we are sad, because they seem to be in vain and we are like the fledglings, which the mother bird pushed “from the nest to the ground, from which it must learn to fly by its own EFFORTS… How many apparently fruitless EFFORTS the helpless little creature puts forth ere it is able to soar with outspread wings to the height from which it was first cast down – yet no single EFFORT was, in reality, fruitless. You, like the fledgling, may fall back to the level where evolutionary law has now placed you, again and again, in your EFFORTS to reach the spiritual height from which you were impelled by Karmic law, and be forced to reincarnate on the physical plane; but, so long as the great compassionate Soul of the Infinite feels a throb in response to its own beating against your heart, you may lift up your head, however low it has been laid, and say, “I have not yet failed.” (TT Nr. 19, p. 45)

Without EFFORT there is no development. Men sometimes it can be too much.
“The Soul’s memory of its former high estate has been sufficient to furnish the dynamic energy for the first necessary expulsive and ascending EFFORT; but, as has so repeatedly occurred in the case of man, lower desire runs away with Reason and Intuition, and tries to force him upward in the scale of evolution by leaps and bounds – while the truth is that the energy exhausted by any such leap and bound stays his progress at the step so reached, until sufficient energy is generated to take him a step further; and in that interval, the masses of mankind he had left behind in that supreme EFFORT, have reached a position similar to that attained by him, by steady normal growth, and reached it minus the weakening strain imposed upon some parts of his nature by the extra effort to pass others in the race.” (TT Nr. 93, p. 243)

That’s why we are again and again told, that we well should make an EFFORT to further progress every moment of the day, but that the progress is gained step by step and not by leaps and bounds. Really comforting, that we are not encouraged to overtax ourselves continuously. On the other hand that does not mean that we are allowed to rest on our laurels.

“He who would truly benefit his kind should endeavor to realize somewhat of the divine plan – “the plan in the mind of God” – and work toward the materialization of that plan. But however great and pure his purpose he must recognize the fact that in the carrying out of his purpose he might interfere as to time, place or position with some feature of the Divine plan, if some detail were fulfilled at once, and so be prepared to see all his preparations, his labour and EFFORTS swept aside for the time being, and to do it without losing his equilibrium, secure in the knowledge that all that is divine