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Discipleship in the New Age II - Teachings on Meditation - Part XIV
Have you ever stopped to think that the meditation of a Master upon the Plan of which he is custodian, and his formulation of what he can do along the line of effective cooperation, is of no service or usefulness to the illiterate inhabitants of our great cities and agricultural areas? The need of these unthinking masses must be met by disciples of less spiritual development, and probably their greatest appeal is through the application of economic help; the task of these lesser disciples is to prove to the ignorant masses that - as the centuries slip away - spiritual living and true spiritual understanding include every aspect of physical plane expression and not simply the religious or the philosophic modes of thought. The meditation, therefore, of every grade of disciple and initiate has its use, for by their meditation (carried forward on their own level) they can adapt the Plan to the widely differing masses and thus the hierarchical Plan can reach from the Masters of the Hierarchy, through the Ashrams to the New Group of World Servers, and thus to the whole of the human family. I would like you to grasp the true simplicity of this picture, if you can, for you can have a share also in this great meditative task. One of the things which I set myself to achieve when I undertook this work of making the Plan clearer to the minds of men, and thus preparing the way for the Master of all the Masters, was to prove not only that the Plan was based upon planetary meditation but that, in its progress towards expression, it met the need of all possible groups and grades of human beings; and that - more important still - it could be proved that the word "spiritual" covered every phase of living experience. Ponder on this statement. That is spiritual which lies beyond the point of present achievement; it is that which embodies the vision and which urges the man on towards a goal higher than the one attained. The ecclesiastics of the world have made a great line of demarcation between what is human and what is spiritual, between what is material and what is not; in so doing they have created sin and [235] greatly complicated human living and understanding. They have given a selfish import to human aspiration; they have not taught mankind that meditation and prayer were simply phases of cooperation with the divine Plan. Individualism was fostered and group understanding was lost. Maybe - owing to the work of the Brothers of Darkness - there was no way to avoid this dangerous sidetracking of human intent and truth. But the time has now come when the great rhythm of meditation, ranging from desire through prayer to worship, and from thence to meditation and invocation, can be imposed by men upon their own thinking. This is the immediate task of the New Group of World Servers, cooperating everywhere with the men of goodwill; each member of the New Group has to ascertain for himself where he stands, where his meditative responsibility lies and in what field destiny indicates his service to the race of men must be found. This is no easy task, brother of mine. Men are frequently so spiritually ambitious and waste their time in doing that which is not their destined task because in so doing they satisfy their spiritual pride. You must learn to give a wider connotation to the word "meditation" than you have hitherto given. Concentrated thought is part of the planetary meditation; planning with care for the helping of the needy and pursuing all avenues of thinking to make that plan useful and effective is meditation; laying oneself open to spiritual impression and thus to cooperation with the Hierarchy is meditation; in this enumeration of meditative possibilities I have not touched upon the major creative meditation which is responsible for the evolutionary process and the controlled moving forward of all the world of forms into greater glory and light. The work hitherto done in such occult groups as the Arcane School and others, as they teach meditation, has been nothing but the learning of a needed concentration. Only in the meditation work of the fourth degree has some of the creative work become possible and that in its most elementary stages; yet the Arcane School leads the aspirants of the world in meditation of an occult nature, though not in any way a mystical nature. The mystical type of meditation [236] is of ancient formulation and its use indicates the next step for the masses of men; the practice of mystical meditation is not that which should be followed by aspirants and disciples who seek to work in an Ashram in cooperation with the Plan and under the guidance of a Master. Meditation only becomes effective creatively and on all the three planes in the three worlds when the antahkarana is in process of construction. The worlds of the personality are the worlds of the third divine aspect and the creation of thought-form therein (as usually carried forward by the concrete mind) is related to form, to the acquisition of that which is desired and dedicated largely to the material values. But when a man is beginning to function as a soul-infused personality and is occupied with the task of rendering himself sensitive to the higher spiritual impression, then the creative work of the Spiritual Triad can be developed and a higher form of creative meditation can be employed. It is a form which each person has to find and discover for himself, because it must be the expression of his own spiritual understanding, initiated by a conscious construction or creation of the antahkarana and subject to impression from the Ashram with which he may be affiliated.
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