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

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The Rays and the Initiations - Part Two - Section One - The Aspirant and the Mysteries of Initiation

The Science of the Anatahkarana

As we enter on the consideration of "The dual life of the initiatory process" I would call your attention to the wording used, and particularly to its significance in reference to the initiatory process. This deals, as we shall see, not with the effort of the disciple to live simultaneously the life of the spiritual world and the practical life of physical plane service, but entirely with the preparation of the disciple for initiation, and therefore with his mental life and attitudes.

This statement might be regarded as concerning itself primarily with two major aspects of his mental life and not with the life of relation between soul and personality. It is proper, consequently, to see a duality existing in the consciousness of the disciple, and both of its aspects existing side by side:

The life of awareness in which he expresses the soul attitude, soul awareness and soul consciousness, through the medium of the personality upon the physical plane; this he learns to register and express consciously.
The intensely private and purely subjective life in which he - the soul-infused personality - oriented upon the mental plane, brings into increasing rapport:
1. His lower concrete mind and the higher abstract mind.
2. Himself and the Master of his ray group, thus developing the ashramic consciousness.
3. Himself and the Hierarchy as a whole, becoming increasingly aware of the spiritual synthesis underlying the united Ashrams. He thus consciously and steadily approaches the radiant Center of this solar Ashram, the Christ Himself, the first Initiator. [442]

This inner life with its three slowly revealed objectives concerns essentially the life of preparation for initiation.

There is no initiation for the disciple until he has begun consciously to build the antahkarana, thus bringing the Spiritual Triad and the mind as the highest aspect in the three worlds into a close relationship; later, he brings his physical brain into a position of a recording agent upon the physical plane, thus again demonstrating a clear alignment and a direct channel from the Spiritual Triad straight through to the brain via the antahkarana which has linked the higher mind and the lower.

This involves much work, much interpretive capacity and much power to visualize. I am choosing my words with care. This visualization is not necessarily concerned with form and with concrete mental presentations; it is concerned with a pictorial and symbolic sensitivity which expresses interpretively the spiritual understanding, conveyed by the awakening intuition - the agent of the Spiritual Triad. The meaning of this becomes clearer as the work proceeds. It is difficult for the man who is beginning the work of constructing the antahkarana to grasp the meaning of visualization as it is seen to be related to a growing responsiveness to that which the ashramic group conveys to him, to his emerging vision of the divine Plan as it exists in reality, and to that which is committed to him as the effect or the result of each successive initiation. I prefer the word "effect" to the word "result," for the initiate increasingly works consciously with the Law of Cause and Effect on planes other than the physical. We use the word "result" to express the consequences of that great cosmic Law as they demonstrate in the three worlds of human evolution.

It is in connection with this effort that he discovers the value, uses and purpose of the creative imagination. This creative imagination is all that remains to him eventually of the active and intensely powerful astral life which he has lived for so many lives; as evolution proceeds, his astral body becomes a mechanism of transformation, desire being transformed into aspiration and aspiration itself being transformed [443] into a growing and expressive intuitive faculty. The reality of this process is demonstrated in the emergence of that basic quality which has always been inherent in desire itself: the imaginative quality of the soul, implementing desire and steadily becoming a higher creative faculty as desire shifts into ever higher states and leads to ever higher realizations. This faculty eventually invokes the energies of the mind, and the mind, plus the imagination, becomes in time a great invocative and creative agent. It is thus that the Spiritual Triad is brought into rapport with the threefold personality.

I have told you in earlier writings that basically the astral plane is non-existent as a part of the divine Plan; it is fundamentally the product of glamor, of kama-manas - a glamor which humanity itself has created and in which it has lived practically entirely since early Atlantean days. The effect of an increasing soul contact has not simply been to dispel the mists of glamor, but it has also served to consolidate and to bring into effective use, therefore, the imagination with its overwhelmingly powerful creative faculty. This creative energy, when implemented by an illumined mind (with its thought-form making ability), is then wielded by the disciple in order to make contacts higher than with the soul, and to bring into symbolic form that of which he becomes aware through the medium of a line of energy - the antahkarana - which he is steadily and scientifically creating.

It might be said (equally symbolically) that at each initiation he tests the connecting bridge and discovers gradually the soundness of that which he has created under the inspiration of the Spiritual Triad and with the aid of the three aspects of his mind (the abstract mind, the soul or the Son of Mind, and the lower concrete mind), combined with the intelligent cooperation of his soul-infused personality. In the early stages of his invocative work, the instrument used is the creative imagination. This enables him at the very beginning to act as if he were capable of thus creating; then, when the as if imaginative consciousness is no longer [444] useful, he becomes consciously aware of that which he has - with hope and spiritual expectancy - sought to create; he discovers this as an existent fact and knows past all controversy that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

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