Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - The Rays and the Initiations - Part I

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The Rays and the Initiations - Part One - Fourteen Rules For Group Initiation

Synthesis dictates the trend of all the evolutionary processes today; all is working towards larger unified blocs, towards amalgamations, international relationships, global planning, brotherhood, economic fusion, the free flow of commodities everywhere, interdependence, fellowship of faiths, movements based upon the welfare of humanity as a whole, and ideological concepts which deal with wholes and which militate against division, separation and isolation.

Little as people realize it, these concepts are relatively new factors in the human consciousness, and the fact that they are the result of a new and direct relation between Those Who implement the will of God and humanity everywhere is the guarantee of the inevitability of their expression in the future. It is only in the immediate interim - a period of one hundred fifty years - that delay may seem the rule. Such, however, will not really be the case. The forms through which these new and impending ideas must take shape and manifest have yet to be created, and that takes time, for they are built by the power of thought and due process of educating the public consciousness until that consciousness becomes confirmed conviction and demonstrates as an immovable public opinion.

This sense of synthesis is one of the things which the new esoteric schools will develop in their students and neophytes, for it will be the people trained interiorly in these schools who will be the builders of the new world and the trainers of future public opinion. The labels and the names whereby these schools may call themselves mean but little. Many will proclaim themselves as esoteric schools and will communicate nothing of a truly esoteric nature. They will but attract to themselves the gullible and the foolish. There are many such functioning in this manner today. Others may refrain from all outer indication of esoteric and occult training, and yet convey the needed teaching. They will seek to relate the One, the Monad, to the personality, and to evoke in their students a true sense of synthesis.

It is the sense of synthesis, putting it very simply, which will be the goal of all the educational movements, once the [122] New Age idealism is firmly established. Physical coordination, personal integrity (which involves primarily the control and later the negation of the astral body), and personality integration will be the essential first steps. To this will succeed processes whereby the fusion of the personality with the soul, of the lower self with the higher Self, and of form with the divine Dweller in the form will follow next. Then the truly esoteric phase of the educational process will be attempted when the earlier steps or stages have been satisfactorily grasped and there is indication of some measure of real success. By that time the school of the Mysteries and the Halls of preparation for initiation will be generally recognized by the thinking people and believed in by the expectant masses.

In those schools, those who are beginning to function as souls will be led on to take their next step. Their developed soul nature will be expressing itself through intelligent love and a sense of group fellowship; these two divine qualities will form a basis or foundation from which the next unfoldment can emerge and on which a more spiritual superstructure can be built. The Science of Meditation and the conscious building of the antahkarana will be the first two preliminary stages in the esoteric curriculum. Today, the true teaching of meditation and the construction of the bridge of light between the Triad and the personality are the most advanced teaching given anywhere.

Humanity is, however, ready for exceedingly rapid development and this readiness will demonstrate increasingly in the postwar period, and for it the disciples of the world must make ready. Two factors will bring this about: the first is the tremendous stimulation which the war, its demands and its consequences have given to the human consciousness and, secondly, the coming in of very advanced souls ever since the year 1925. These souls will be ready to give the needed training and instruction when the right time comes, having brought it over with them when they came into incarnation, and knowing normally and naturally [123] what the modern esoteric student is struggling to grasp and understand.

A study of what I have here outlined as basic requirements will show that the esoteric schools about which I wrote in Letters on Occult Meditation lie far ahead in the distant future. The work of the preparatory schools must come first, and their work will proceed until such time that the work of the Ashrams of the Masters is recognized as forming part of an outer hierarchical activity. This in due time will lead to the giving of the first initiation publicly, as a part of the great service ritual of the then prevalent universal religion. The race of men will then - in its most advanced brackets and groups in every country in the world - be normally clairvoyant, and will therefore see for themselves the light within the candidates; they will know then that the first initiation is justifiably undergone, and they will also see the same light in thousands who in previous incarnations have taken that initiation.

One thing only will I add to the above and to the elucidation of the significance of Rule V. The clue to all this esoteric work demanded by Shamballa is to be found in the development of the Art of Visualization. Through visualization, three expressions of the human consciousness will become possible:

1. The antahkarana can be built and the shining of the Triad be definitely seen. Such will be the new vision - an outcome of the development of the sense of vision.

2. Groups, large wholes and major syntheses will also be visualized, and this will lead to a definite expansion of consciousness. Thus the sense of synthesis will be unfolded.

3. All creative art will be fostered by this training, and the new art of the future in all departments of creativity will be rapidly developed as the training proceeds. The unfoldment of the sense of vision and of the sense of synthesis, through visualization, will lead to a sense of livingness in form. [124]

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