The Theosophical Forum – January 1949

KEYNOTES OF DAY TO DAY LIVING — Hazel Boyer Braun

The fundamental thoughts of a human life might be likened to the keynote of a musical composition. Thoughts are living energies and our tomorrows and our next lives are actually created by the vision of today. It is important to make a deliberate effort to strike certain notes in our lives.

The most far reaching thought we can embrace in the effort to shape our own characters is found in the Ancient Wisdom, in the concept of the Divine Reality at the root of everything that lives. As the matrix of our thought life this revelation colors every phase of our daily existence. It washes out of our minds triviality and personal pettiness, it quickens our feeling of relationship with all beings. All fear is driven out because we can know more of love. Individual responsibility is then so strongly impressed upon us that we have no time to be much concerned about what others do to us or think of us.

As trees grow most of them fling their confining bark to the winds each year, and in this we have an analogy with the development of the human mind. We do break through our crystallized thoughts and fling the old ones away as we awake into broader understanding, lifting the level of our thoughts, expanding the reaches of our consciousness.

We all have flights of imagination, but we each have a certain individual characteristic landing place for all our flights. We have each our special way of thinking which creates our lives and enwraps us in an atmosphere that is felt by every person we contact. Very often we have far more effect on the life of others than we fully realize.

We all have some aspirations, we might say some secret hopes that are truly the keynote of our inner life. There are many who are only vaguely aware of the yearnings of their real selves and the quality and direction of their inner experience is not well defined. Yet the substance of our secret hopes fashions our tomorrows.

When we wake in the morning we really strike the note of the day in those few minutes before we rise and take up our work by the vision we have then of our day. When we die we do the same, our last thoughts are likely to be akin to those deep secret aspirations even more than to our personal loves; and they strike the keynote for our time spent in the dreaming of Devachan, fashioning also to a great extent our next life.

The ancients knew this so well that it actually is the explanation of the icons and the countless statues of Buddhas, Bodhisattwas, and Kuan Yins. They were formed by the artists to help in the visioning of these full-blown divinities, to serve as a model for our expectations, to symbolize the fundamental concept of the purpose of life: becoming divine, knowing companionship with the great Souls.



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