Good deeds

‘do not let your left hand know what your right is doing’

July 12th 2025

One fine summer’s evening some country folk were dancing in the village square merrily stamping the ground with their boots. A young peasant, who was extremely poor, could not join in the dancing since he had no boots. But he so wanted to join in that he asked a friend to lend him his boots. Happy that he could finally join the circle, he started to stamp his feet energetically. On seeing this, his friend shouted, ‘Hey, don’t stamp your feet so hard, you’ll ruin my boots!’ The young dancer felt humiliated because everyone now knew that he had had to borrow the boots. Another friend, seeing his embarrassment, said to him quietly, ‘Take off those boots, I’ll lend you a pair with which you can dance all you like.’ So the young man changed boots and went back to join the dancers. No sooner had he taken his first steps than his friend called out, ‘Go on! Stamp as hard as you like, if you wear out those boots I’ll lend you another pair.’ The poor lad turned red with shame, because for the second time, everyone heard that he had no boots of his own.
Like the young man’s two friends, people’s lower nature makes itself heard by shouting about the services rendered. Good deeds must be done in secret. Jesus said, ‘Do not let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ in other words, do not let your lower nature know what your higher nature is doing, otherwise your lower nature will boast about it and spoil everything.*
* Related reading:

True alchemy consists in working with the two masculine and feminine principles that act in all creation and in the human being himself: the will (the Sun) and the imagination (the Moon). With these two virtues we manage to transmute our own matter and become radiant and pure. Then we can hope...