THE AKRON BEACON JOURNAL

Akron, Ohio, U.S.A.

8 August 1921

(page 1, 15)

Why Worry About Butcher And Baker

When You’re Not Human Being, But

Mere Crystalization At End of Rays Of Star.

CHICAGO, Aug 8.—Why worry about the butcher and the baker and the undertaker? You are not the mere human being you suppose, but a star in the sky. Your mortal body is but the crystallization at the end of one of the rays from your star. The ray will pass away but you shall shine on forever.

Such is the teaching of Frater Achad [Charles Stansfeld Jones], master of the Temple of the Great White Brotherhood of the A.A., who held a weird ritualistic service at the fashionable Edgewater beach hotel yesterday.

“As a star you transcend all passion, emotion and even intellect, and dwell on a lofty spiritual plane.” he said. “On this plane male and female are one. Black and white, big and little, and every other pair of opposites that confuse the mortal mind are cancelled.”

Barefooted and in a white robe, Frater Achad carries on his Sunday services in the ballroom of the exclusive hotel. The ritual is the strangest ever beheld in a religious community in this country. It reminds one of something oriental with a dash of Aztec ceremony.

With a dagger in his hand he makes the sign of the cross and invokes the four archangels to protect him during the ceremony. Then he makes a circuit of the room where the audience is seated in a crescent and cuts the sir with his dagger above the heads of the people.

This with a series of vocal vibrations he calls the “banishing ritual,” because, he says, it banishes all the evil influences from the room.

Returning to the subject of man, he said: “Man is a universe creature. He has in him all the qualities and possibilities of creation. It is up to each person to develop these. I am seeking to teach people how to do this scientifically. I want to help man enter the super-conscious stage where he will live a true spiritual life.”

The barefoot teacher then went on to say that every person should express his own great desire to its fullest.

Achad said his teachings are taken from “the book of the law.”

“This book proved there is a person thinking and acting in a praeterhuman manner, either without body of flesh or with the power of communicating telepathically with men and inscrutably directing their actions.”

“Each person is a star in the sky,” he said. “We are just beginning to find our true relation to the universe. Man is incarnated on this planet when one of the rays of his star strikes the earth. When, in the movement of the planets that ray leaves the earth we enter what we call death.”

“And what is death in your opinion?” I asked.

“Death,” he replied, “is an ecstacy like love, but more intense, it is the reunion of the soul with its true self—the star. Then we know and remember all things that happened to us in all the lives we lived in this world and on other planets. This is death compared to that state, for now we know and remember very little.”