A great many people today feel the need for some practical methods that will help them to grow spiritually.A New Erth responds to that need. It contains a number of simple, effective, spiritual exercises taken from the thousands of lectures given by the Master Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov over a period of nearly fifty years. Some concern our everyday life: nutrition, breathing, hygiene, purification, and our relationships with nature and other human beings. Others touch on questions that are more directly spiritual: meditation and prayer, the development of our psychic centres, or chakras, the aura, the body of glory, and so on. All these methods grow out of that immense body of knowledge known as initiatic science, the principal goal of which is the advent of the 'new heaven and the new earth' announced in scripture.

‘When Jesus said to his disciples: “If you have the faith of the mustard seed, you will say to this mountain: Move from here to there, and it will move”, obviously this mountain is symbolic. The mountain represents the great difficulties of life that faith alone allows us to move, that is to say to resolve. In one year, two years, ten years, stone by stone, we will succeed in moving mountains. You think that this is a long time and you would like it to be done immediately. Then, in that case, copy the ants which manage in very little time to move great heaps of seeds, proportionally they represent mountains for them! Yes, but an ant does not work alone, there are multitudes of them working together. In isolation and egotism, we will never move mountains. If great things have been achieved throughout history, it is because humans were united in working together. Moving mountains means to remove in ourselves and in the world the obstacles which oppose the coming of the Kingdom of God. This is possible only if all spiritual people unite in faith and love to undertake a great work of light and peace; they will obtain many more results and the link created between them will be more powerful.’

True morality is everywhere manifest in Nature, the extension of the natural laws that govern our psychic life. When human beings break these laws they pay by suffer-ing or illness. The reader will no doubt be surprised to learn that true morality is not a limitation; on the contrary it confers tremendous freedom and increases our power of action. If we obeyed these laws both in our own lives and in our dealings with others, the result would be the ideal society.

'Meditate on harmony, love it, long for it so as to introduce it into your every gesture, every look, every word. Let the word "harmony" impregnate you; keep it within you as a kind of pitch pipe, and when you are feeling worried or upset, take it out and listen to it and do nothing until your whole being is in tune with it once more. In the morning, when you wake, remember to begin your day by tuning yourself to the world of universal harmony... When you enter a house let your first thought be: "May peace and harmony reign in this house.'

‘The foods we eat every day obviously contain life, but they don’t yet possess the spirit. So we must, when we eat, concentrate on the food so that our spirit participates in this act. On eating the food, the spirit impregnates our own matter which it transforms, enlightens and regenerates .’ 

‘Know thyself” was the maxim inscribed on the pediment of the temple at Delphi. What is this ‘self’ that we have to know? Is it a question of knowing our own vices and virtues, our strengths and weaknesses? No: to know oneself is to know the different bodies (the physical, etheric, mental, causal, buddhic and atmic bodies) of which we are formed and what each of these bodies needs. If the initiates of old insisted so much on the necessity of self-knowledge it was because this knowledge opens up tremendous possibilities for growth, progress and success. As long as man is ignorant of the needs of his higher self, he will continue to surfeit his physical body while his soul and spirit suffocate and die of hunger and thirst.’ Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Know thyself! All science and all wisdom lies in knowing oneself, in finding oneself, in the fusion of one's lower self with one's higher self. The symbol of the initiate who has succeeded in finding himself is the serpent with its tail in its mouth. A serpent forms a straight or wavy line, and a line is limited. But the serpent with its tail in its mouth forms a cirde and a cirde represents the infinite, the limitless, the eternal. He who succeeds in becoming a circle enters a world without limitations where the 'above' and the 'below' are no longer separated, because all the powers and all the riches and virtues of the true, higher self have been infused into the lower self. The higher and the lower become one and man becomes a divinity.

'Human beings come and go, work and play, and busy themselves with all kinds of things, never realizing that their life is growing dim and dirty because they do nothing to protect it. They think that the life they have received is theirs to dispose of, and that they have a right to use it for pleasure or become rich, learned or renowned, as they please. So they draw on their reserves without restraint until, one day, they find themselves utterly spent and obliged to abandon all their activities. It is completely senseless to behave like that for, once we have wasted our supply of life, we have no other resources to fall back on. The Sages have always said that the only thing that is essential is life itself, and that we must protect, purify and sanctify it and eliminate whatever may hinder or prevent it from developing. And, if we do so, life will give us everything else: health, strength, power, intelligence and beauty - every thing ! The highest form of magic, the highest form of White Magic is to lead a pure, luminous life.'

‘Sexuality tends to be self-centred. It drives man to seek only his own pleasure, even to the detriment of others. Love, on the other hand, thinks of the other’s happiness above all else. It is based on self-denial and sacrifice: the sacrifice of one’s time, energy and money, even the sacrifice of one’s gratification, for the sake of helping the other, of allowing the other to blossom and develop his full potential. Nothing is more beautiful than love, when you are ready to do without, to give up what you have or what you enjoy. Spirituality begins precisely at the point where love prevails over sexuality, when a human being is willing to wrest something from himself for the sake of another. As long as you are incapable of sacrifice, you will be unable to love.’