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Discipleship in the New Age II - Personal Instructions to Disciples - W.D.S.
2. The stage of "advance." By this I do not refer to progress in understanding. That is inevitable in time and incidental in space when the disciple is immovable in his determination. I refer to the process of his moving forward (technically understood) along the pillared corridor, simultaneously with his appearance in the outer world as an ashramic worker. You have a phrase which is usually employed in a derogatory sense of "social climber"; it refers to a person who - dissatisfied with his social position, his social contacts and his social relationships - uses every and any method to penetrate into those social milieus which have seemed unattainable. It is a platitude to say that all unworthy goals (because incorrectly motivated) are the lower correspondence or symbolic expressions (e'en though distorted) of higher aims and aspirations. This thought should clarify your thinking. A disciple at this stage is a man whose character and capacities have permitted him to enter the Ashram with the full consent of its membership. He hovers, however, on the periphery of its activities; he knows that here are action, contacts and relationships - within the ashramic ring-pass-not - which can be his some day. Yet he also knows that he has to master the meaning of the paradoxical statement with which his voiced aspiration was met: "Go out the door and leave the Ashram as it was and as you are; seek for another entrance; find what you seek by leaving it behind; move forward through the art of moving back." In the blazing light of the Ashram the disciple realizes that he has not yet earned the right to pass along the corridor to the Master's sanctum, but must needs go forth [634] into the world of men, of darkness and of pain; then he can return to the Ashram for strength to continue his work outside. What lies outside the door of the Ashram, symbolically speaking, becomes to him of greater moment than his own success in passing along the corridor. What has happened to him, as both his eyes "function in the dual light," is that his sense of values is adjusted and his own progressive satisfaction becomes of less importance to him than what he can do to ameliorate the pain and distress outside the door.
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