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Autobiography of Alice A. Bailey - Chapter V
This idea of status and position has been the curse of the T.S. and many occult groups. Often have I said to the school secretaries that the fact that they have seniority in the A.S. need be no indication of spiritual development and that they may have in their group of students a beginner who is way ahead of them on the Path of Discipleship. Why people should think that an emotional, strong feeling, sentient, perceptive person is less important than the mental type is another thing that has bewildered me. Nobody can exist without their heart or their head and the true occult student is a combination of both. No Arcane School member is permitted, by the heads of the T.S. to belong to the E.S. without relinquishing affiliation with us. This is all wrong and part of the great heresy of separateness. We require no such separation and we tell the students that if the School succeeds in deepening their spiritual life in widening their horizon and in increasing their mental perception it is up to them to work it out in the church, society, organization or group, the home or community in [197] which their lot is cast. Because of this we have active students who are members of the various theosophical organizations, each of which regards itself as the only true one. We have students belonging to four different groups of Rosicrucians. We have church members, Catholic and Protestant, Christian Scientists, Unity people and members of almost every possible organization which has a spiritual or religious basis. We take people who have no beliefs at all but who are willing to accept an hypothesis and attempt to prove its worth. The Arcane School is therefore non-sectarian, non-political, but deeply international in its thinking. Service is its keynote. Its members can work in any sect and any political party provided that they remember that all paths lead to God and that the welfare of the one humanity governs all their thinking. Above everything else, this is a school in which a student is taught that the souls of men are one. I would like to add, also, that this is a school wherein belief in the spiritual Hierarchy of our planet is scientifically taught, not as a doctrine but as an existent and demonstrable kingdom in nature. There has been much church teaching given about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of souls. These are but terms for the phrase used above, the Spiritual Hierarchy of the planet. It is a school wherein true, occult obedience is developed. This occult obedience involves no obedience to me or any other head of the School or to any human being. No oaths of allegiance or personal pledges to any individual are requested or exacted from students in the Arcane School. They are taught, however, prompt obedience to the dictates of their own soul. As the voice of that soul gets increasingly familiar it will eventually make them members of the Kingdom of God and bring them face to face with Christ. So in 1923 we started a school that was non-doctrinal, [198] non-sectarian and based on the Ageless Wisdom that has come down to us from the very night of time. We started a school which had a definite purpose and a specific objective - a school which was inclusive and not exclusive and that oriented its students toward a life of service as the road of approach to the Hierarchy instead of the road of selfish, spiritual self-culture. We determined that the work should be hard and stiff and difficult so the non-intelligent would be eliminated. One of the easiest things in the world to do is to start a self-interest occult school and it is being done all the time, but we wanted nothing of that kind. Little by little we learned how to organize the work and how to train the staff and how to systematize the records and take those businesslike methods that would insure our students being promptly serviced. We have kept the school on a voluntary basis financially and make no charge for the work. In this way we are under no obligation, financially, to the students and I feel free to drop a student any time if he is not profiting by what we do. We have no "angel" back of the work and no large donor of any kind. The work is supported by the small subscriptions of the many, which is very much sounder and more dependable. I think this is all I have to tell you about the inception of the school and its functioning. It is the very heart of all we do. We now have a British section, a Dutch section, an Italian section, a Swiss section and a South American section with organized work in Turkey and West Africa and members scattered in many other countries. The school papers go out in many languages and the students in these countries are handled by secretaries who speak their language. The service activities extend into an even wider field and I shall not attempt to deal with them here. The next six years, from 1924 to 1930, are somewhat monotonous. As I look over them I am profoundly conscious [199] of a cycle in which day after day, week after week, month after month, I did the same thing as I continued to develop the Arcane School. I was continuously writing school papers and articles. I was eternally seeing people by appointment and by 1928 I was often seeing people every twenty minutes right through the day. I never flattered myself that this was because I was such a wonderful person. It was largely because I made no charge. These were the years in which every kind of psychologist was lecturing up and down the land. Every type of psychoanalyst was giving appointments and charging heavily for them. I never made any charge and my days were full of seeing people who had some problem or other and hoped I could solve it. There was one woman in New York at that time who charged $500 for a half hour appointment and she had a waiting list. I'll guarantee that she never gave as useful advice as I gave for nothing.
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