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The Rays and the Initiations - Part One - Fourteen Rules For Group Initiation
There are three doors into Shamballa, speaking figuratively: 1. There is the door of the reason, of pure perception of truth. Christ gave the clue to this teaching when He said "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." Of that Way we know much, because upon the Way a vast body of teaching has been given, and that teaching, if followed, brings a man into the Hierarchy. He then becomes a factual part of the hierarchical membership. Of that Truth, we know (as aspirants) relatively very little. Truth - as we understand it during the early treading of the Path of Discipleship - is concerned with great verities which are (from the insight of the Enlightened Ones) only the ABC of life. These truths are: The manifestation of divinity on the physical plane. The doctrine of Avatars. This religious history reveals. The nature of consciousness, through the development of psychology. The doctrine of the Trinity, as it expresses itself through the aspects and the attributes. These four expressions of truth will be found to convey all the knowledge with which the initiate must stand equipped [140] when he climbs the Mount of Transfiguration at the time of the third initiation. They have given him a spiritual perception of the Plan. Of that Life, we know nothing whatsoever. The contemplation of its significance belongs to Those Who can move at will within the "precincts of the Lord of Life" - in Shamballa itself. All we can know about it is its lowest step. This enables us to study the impulse or instinct which enables all forms of life to function, which embodies the principles of responsiveness to contacts and to environment, and which embodies itself in the breath of life; this is also related to the air in some mysterious manner, and also to fire. More anent this subject it would be useless for me to say. 2. There is also the door of the will. This is a penetrating power which relates Plan to Purpose and which has in it the faculty of coherent persistence. The reason for this persistence is that it is not dependent upon the content of the form - whether it is the form of an atom, of a man or of a planet - but upon a vital dynamic and immutable purpose, latent in the consciousness of the planetary Being Who, "having pervaded this entire universe with a fragment" of Himself, Remains - greater, more inscrutable and "firmer in intent" than any of His creations, even the most advanced and the closest to Him. Only those have clear perception of His divine purpose who do not belong to our earth humanity at all; these are the Lives who came with Him to this planet when He came, and Who remain with Him as "the prisoners of loving intention" until the last weary pilgrim has found his way home." This spiritual will is something of which humanity knows nothing; it is hidden and veiled by the self-will of the individual and the group will of the soul. Through both of these experiences the human being moves until his individual will is developed and grounded, focused and reoriented, and his group will is unfolded so that it includes and swallows up the dedicated, conscious, individual will. When this fusion has taken place (at the third initiation) a [141] great revelation unfolds itself, and for the first time the initiate senses and then contacts the universal will; from that moment the initiate says, "Father, not my will but Thine be done." Just a little of what that will includes may emerge as we study this seventh rule and some of the succeeding rules. 3. I can find no words to express the nature of the third door. Let us, in default of a better term, call it the door of the monadic sense of essential duality. Body and life, soul and personality, the Spiritual Triad and its expression, the Christ in incarnation - all these dualities have played their part. Man has passed from one expansion of consciousness to another. Now he comes to the final duality of spirit and matter, prior to their resolution into something to which the terms "isolated unity" and "universal synthesis" give only faint and inadequate clues. To the development of this system of identification the initiate of the degree of Master of the Wisdom, and also (on a higher turn of the spiral) of the degree of the Christ, are focusing all Their efforts. Up to the fourth initiation, the term "system of expansions" would seem illuminating; after that great initiation, the term "system of identification" would appear more appropriate.
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