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The Rays and the Initiations - Part One - Fourteen Rules For Group Initiation
4. Destroy What is this destruction which the disciple and the initiate (under instruction from this final rule) is asked to bring about? What is he required to destroy? Why is this destruction ordered? Let me start with a basic statement: Destruction or the power and the wish to destroy which is characteristic of the undeveloped man, of the average man and of the probationary disciple is based upon the following impelling influences: Lack of self-control along some line. Desire to attain one's wishes by the removal of all obstacles. Violent emotional reaction. Revenge, hate, acquisitiveness and similar faults, based on lack of spiritual unfoldment. The effort to remove hindrances within oneself, such as those implied in the rule for probationary disciples: Kill out desire. The deliberate destruction of all that prevents contact with the soul. The destroying of all links which hold the spiritual man in the three worlds. These motives for destruction are all related to desire, to emotion and also to aspiration, implemented (towards the end of the cycle which leads to the treading of the Probationary Path) by the lower concrete mind. They cover a familiar case history and one which is well known to every sincere aspirant, or one which is realized for what they are at a lower level of life expression by the man who pays the penalties involved by this type of destruction. I feel no necessity to enlarge on this mode of destroying to students such as those who read this Treatise. This type of destruction is concerned mainly with form life in the three worlds, with individual aspiration and enterprise (from the lowest [306] groping physical desire up to the aspiration for conscious soul life), and with experiment and experience upon the three planes of ordinary human living. But in this word "destroy" given (as an expressed command) for those who are members of the Hierarchy or who have moved or are moving from an affiliated relationship on the periphery of that Hierarchy toward the center of activity and into close contact with some Ashram, the significance is very different. The type of destruction here dealt with is never the result of desire; it is an effort of the spiritual will and is essentially an activity of the Spiritual Triad; it involves the carrying out of those measures which will hinder obstruction to God's will; it is the furthering of those conditions which will destroy those who are attempting to prevent divine purpose from materializing as the Plan - for which the Hierarchy is responsible. Therefore, it is connected primarily with the relation of Shamballa to the Hierarchy, and not with the relation of the Hierarchy to Humanity. This is a formidable esoteric statement and its implications must be considered most carefully. This type of destruction has only a secondary relation to the destruction of form life as you know it. When steps are taken to implement divine purpose, the resultant effect may be the destroying of forms in the three worlds, but that is an effect and only a secondary destruction; something else has been destroyed on a higher level and outside the three worlds. This, in due time, may produce a form-reaction to which we may give the name of death. But the death of that form was not a primary objective and was not even considered, because it was not within the range of awareness of the destroyer. The higher destruction which we are considering is related to the destruction of certain forms of consciousness which express themselves in great areas or extensive thought-forms; these may have, in turn, conditioned human thinking. Perhaps the simplest illustration I can give you of this type of destruction would be concerned with the major ideologies which down the ages have conditioned or may [307] condition humanity. These ideologies produce potent effects in the three worlds. This type of destruction affects those civilizations which condition the human family for long periods of time, which concern climatic conditions that predispose the forms in the four kingdoms to certain characteristics in time and space, which produce effects in the great world religions, in world politics and all other "conditioning forms of thinking." Does this convey much or little in connection with the concepts which I am attempting to make clear? That which is destroyed, therefore, are certain group forms and these upon a large scale, this requires an exercise of the spiritual will to bring about, and does not require simply the withdrawing of the attention of the soul, the decision to vacate the form and the failure of the basic desire to perpetuate, which is what we imply when we speak of death in the three worlds. The lack of the will-to-live of which we so glibly speak has little relation, in reality, to the will itself; it refers only to its faint or distorted reflection in the three worlds; this is much more closely related to desire and aspiration than to pure will, as spiritually comprehended. The Purpose of God (to use a familiar phrase) is that which implements the Plan. This purpose is the motivating life behind all that emanates from Shamballa and it is that which impulses all the activities of the Hierarchy; the task of the Hierarchy is to formulate the Plan for all forms of life in the three worlds and the four kingdoms in nature. This Plan, in time and space, is not in any way concerned with individual man or with the life of any microcosmic entity in any of the kingdoms of nature, but with the wholes, the cycles of time, with those vast plans of livingness which man calls history, with nations and races, with world religions and great political ideologies and with social organizations which produce permanent changes in types, constitutions, planetary areas and cyclic manifestations. It will therefore be obvious to you that from the standpoint of man's little mind, these plans are well-nigh impossible to [308] grasp. From the standpoint of the vision of the initiate who has developed or is developing the wider grasp and who can see and think and vision (I care not what word you choose) in terms of the Eternal Now, the significance is clear; at times, the initiate creates and then anchors a germ of livingness; at times he builds that which can house his living idea with its conditioning qualities; at times, when these have served their purpose, he definitely and deliberately destroys. The reference is necessarily ever to form; with the initiate it is, however, to the "formless form" which is always the subjective aspect of the tangible world. It must be remembered that from the point of view of esotericism, all forms in the three worlds are tangible, in contradistinction to forms in the two higher worlds of the Spiritual Triad.
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