What Is the Spirituality of Stelle? Q: What I have seen since I have been here is very beautiful, but what I want to ask is, it seems that there is a high advocation of steering away from spirituality into practicality or the manifestation levels and leave the spiritual stuff for someone else. I mean, I see just a blanket taboo put down here to steer clear of spirituality and just do not get into any of that stuff. Yet, by the same token, it seems that this whole community is based upon spirituality. How can we rise our ownselves to be Masters unless we do strive on the path of Love? Unless we do go forward? RK: I do not think we are against love at all. We have emphasized on as many practical levels as possible how people can be more loving. That does not mean more sexual. That means more loving. I think you may have confused my emphasis against getting into the occult with getting into spirituality. The occult and spirituality really are not the same. Spirituality works towards Christ Consciousness, which is primarily lovingness and creativeness; being harmless to all. Getting your needs met without trampling on anyone else’s needs. These are the practical aspects of it and indeed, what Christ talked about. He would talk about practical aspects of how to be spiritual; making great show of spirituality, such as the scribes and Pharisees were want to do. He has spoken against this over and over. If you will be spiritual do so in the closet of your Mind or out of sight of other people. Do not do it for public acclaim. We speak very, very frequently, trying to get people to understand, that the balance is the development of one’s ideality, one’s practicality, and one’s mentality. You have to continue to enlarge all three aspects in balance. So, what we are—if you see that we are very much concerned with building beautiful homes, and having nice looking grounds and so forth, that does not mean that we are not spiritual. If we do strive for things which are idealistic and artistic, in as much balance as possible. But spirituality is a hard thing to legislate either for or against. You are either into that, or you are not. But we find that people build themselves in—well it is kind of a correspondence between building things which are of service to other people and building yourself. That is a technique which has been used by a number of schools for many ages in the past. Monasteries also use the same kind of techniques. You do not just sit in an ivory tower and dream beautiful thoughts and think of God all day long. You are actually out there sweating in the sun and serving your fellow man by—if there is some kind of pestilence or a drought or something like that, the monastery was supposed to be out helping all the people in its area to get through all these things. It is service to other people. There are many ways by which you can serve others. We tend to serve primarily through educational things: how to uplift children, how to make them more intelligent, how to give them more power to perceive their environment for what it really is and give them the tools by which to cope effectively in a positive way with that environment that they perceive. And we are, after all, a religious, educational organization. That is what The Stelle Group has got its charter as, and we wish to continually concentrate on education. But we also follow this idea that as you build, you build yourself. (08-1983) Spiritual Program at Stelle At this point a woman in the audience asked Richard to enlarge upon the spiritual program of The Stelle Group.” Richard answered that through the study of the Great Virtues and the steady work to make them a part of our daily lives, we try to live in greater accord with the higher precepts taught by Christ when He was on earth. Contemplation and meditation are definitely played down in The Stelle Group; however, instruction will be offered as to the correct way to approach meditation so that the result is beneficial and the very real dangers involved may be avoided. By this it might almost seem that there is no spiritual program for Stelle. The words for the Virtues (Charity, Courage, Devotion, Discrimination, Efficiency, Forbearance, Humility, Kindliness, Precision, Patience, Sincerity, Tolerance) are simple, nice words. But by the practical application of these ideals we may begin again to be truly “human” beings after mankind’s nearly 10,000 years of drifting away from humanity. The individual who actually begins to work at practicing the Virtues finds at the end of a year that he is really quite a different person than he was the year before. In this way, individuals with true determination can make great strides forward. We fear our neighbors far more than is necessary; and if they seem disinclined to friendship, it is probably because they are afraid of us, too. When people become more kindly and more charitable through actual practice, they are able to see that we are actually very much alike. We are afraid of the same things, and there is really no reason for fear because none of us wants these negative things at all. When we practice the Virtues we learn that the world is actually quite benign, as the Creator intended it to be, and that most of the things which we see as quite terrifying are to a great extent imaginary. Uplifting our own character through practice of the Great Virtues is a lifetime process. For most of us, our present environment does not naturally encourage such a practice. One who practices the Golden Rule in present-day society may even be disdained as a fool. We hope to change that concept by creating a community, to be known as Stelle, where individuals of like mind may gather, to be protected from deleterious influences, and to reinforce one another’s efforts toward advancement. (05-1970)
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