This excerpt from the lecture, Meeting Your Inner Master, by Mark Prophet was given on December 31, 1971, at the Class of the Solar Light, held in Colorado Springs, Colorado and published in the 2000 Pearls of Wisdom Vol. 43 No. 28.

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I will tell you something. The great Masters of wisdom, such as Morya and Saint Germain and the others, seldom—I say, seldom—appear to students of the light and hardly at all to the masses, because they are aware of the law of karma governing these appearances and most of the students are not.

If you gaze upon the face of any of your contemporaries and you do not see God there, you have desecrated their temple and your own. Did you ever stop to think about that?

If you do not see God in man and in yourself, you are desecrating the temple of the living God. And, as you go up the ladder of attainment, if you take the name of Jesus Christ in vain and you lightly turn against him or against Master Morya or Mother Mary or any of the great ones, named or unnamed, your karma becomes great.

This is the reason behind the Masters’ withdrawal from the appearance world. They withdraw solely because they do not wish to involve you in a karmic sequence, for they know that if you see one of them and reject them or refuse to do what they say, it becomes an even greater karma. Do you see the point?

So they withdraw from the earth, from the visible realm into the spiritual realm. “And a cloud received him out of their sight.” So it is with everyone who is raised from the dead. Do you see, then, what a great deal of depth there is in the teachings, in the banner of Maitreya, the banner of hope, in the banner of the ages?

When people come to hear the Great White Brotherhood’s teachings, they come to see a man. Yet there is far more than the mere man in the teachings; there is the making of the whole man that is you, every one of you. The greatest desecration in all of life is that we do not permit ourselves to properly esteem or love ourselves as the handiwork of God.

“Until Seventy Times Seven”

We are the handiwork of God. Because we dropped a few stitches here and there, the garment may appear to have nubs or holes or be imperfectly woven. This is not so, because in the crucible of experience, in the molding and making of a man, his experiences are practical ones. When they happen to us, we are able to understand what has happened to others. If they had never happened to us, we might not be able to understand another’s reaction.

I do not say that we should do evil that good may come. That is wrong. But in the course of our struggle toward the light, in trying to reach God, if we should make a few mistakes, we ought to allow it in ourselves and in others.

This question was raised, you know, when the Master Jesus was on earth. The apostles asked, because they had a sense of self-righteousness too, “How oft shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Seven times, Master?”

They thought that seven was the magic number. Jesus turned to them and said, “I say not unto thee until seven times, but until seventy times seven,” showing the infinity of forgiveness toward us and toward others.

The road to a certain place is no doubt paved with the best of intentions, so that we all from time to time may find ourselves in a lesser state than we would want. No matter how badly we want to attain the kingdom of God within us, it may not materialize just the way we wanted, and oh, we wanted it to be so perfect! It is so perfect, but somehow everyone else seems to realize a little bit more of it than we do.

You Need the Master

So we think in terms of meeting the master. That is, we equate meeting the master with overcoming all things. Well, you see, when you meet the master, you meet him because you need help. That’s the whole thing. A lot of people think that they’re going to meet the master because they’re so perfect, but you meet the master because you need the master.