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39. Discipleship in the New Age,Vol. I - 18. SECTION TWO - PERSONAL INSTRUCTIONS TO DISCIPLES - PART 12 - ALICE BAILEY

SECTION TWO - PERSONAL INSTRUCTIONS TO DISCIPLES - PART 12


This diagnosis of mine will, I think, surprise you. The fact remains that you must continue your mental attitudes, cease in no way to be preoccupied with the search for truth and for the occult significance of life, but in your own case, through the medium of the brain and of physical plane contacts, you must aim at being more at-one with your fellowmen. It is perhaps an increased facility in the dual activity of the searchlight of the mind to which I refer. See that the two become the two beams of light with which you increasingly work and that they balance each other. When they do, all glamour disappears.
NOTE: P.G.C. is still one of the Tibetan's trusted workers.
To R. S. U.
November 1931
MY BROTHER:
I have a word for you as you enter on a period of wide usefulness and increased service. You know well your weakness and your strength. There is little along these lines that I can tell you. Your failure is in application of knowledge to the situation. So oft with aspirants, the main weakness lies in one particular body and for you it is the disciplining of the physical body and an inability to apply your ideals to it at need. You treat it oft too well, and yet at times you alternate good treatment with periods when you treat your physical elemental with undue harshness. If you can bring about an evenness of treatment and a balanced method in your handling of your physical problem, much light and knowledge will pour through your brain consciousness. It lies in your hands and there is little that I can do. You are primarily along the occult line. You work with energy and, actually and mentally, you are fairly well controlled and coordinated. You need to work with the physical body and use it in the work you have to do and right there is where hindrance creeps in. You have rich opportunity ahead of you and have earned it. Be not sidetracked but cultivate that one-pointedness which is one of your most vital assets.
One thing I would like to point out: In your breathing exercises which I noted as you worked this week, the lung and the inflation aspect is unduly emphasised and there is too much effort in what you do. The power and subtlety of the pranayama process lies in the potency of the thought behind the act of breathing and not at all really in the inflation and deflation of the torso. The whole thing is summed up in the aphorism, "Energy follows thought." The main effect should be upon the etheric nadis which underlie the nerves, and not upon the bellows-like activity of the lungs. You are not getting the results which you should.... Your work lies largely with individuals and with the task of bringing solutions into life problems; you have the gift of strength to offer to others and the experience gained through many lives. This work can be increased if you deal with firmness, humour and perseverance with the vehicle which hinders you.
June 1933
MY BROTHER:
You have trodden the upward Way with greater speed of late. Your horizon is, therefore, wider and your outlook much more impersonal. Keep steadily on the move and let not inertia drag you down and set weights upon your feet. The work to be done is steadily increasing, brother of old, and you are needed in that work and needed more dynamically than heretofore. Grasp that idea and stand steadily with me in the work I seek to do. Be ready to give of your wisdom and power to unfold and teach when the need arises....
In your early work in meditation you were told to sound the Sacred Word seven times consecutively. I wish you to take up now a sevenfold work upon the centres because some synthetic work will be helpful to you. I will not here outline it in detail as it is planned for individual need and is better not committed to writing for all to read. You will receive the needed instructions directly. Follow them with care and watch for the vitalisation of the physical body as a consequence, and be ready for increased service as time elapses.
The gift of wise teaching is your gift to my group—a wisdom, divorced from criticism, coupled also to the reticence of the trained occultist. This gift you and F.C.D. have in great degree. Give of your wisdom, brother of old, wisely and strongly and without fear. I indicate to many of my disciples their specific gift to the group with which I have affiliated them in order that, with deliberation and knowledge, they may constantly give along the indicated lines and thus contribute to the group life. There is the gift of being these embodied qualities. There is also the gift of realising that because one does embody some divine attribute in some measure—large or small—one can act as a channel for its transmission from the greater centre. This is the basis of the doctrine of Avatars or Divine Messengers. The gift of Being and the gift of deliberate Transmission of qualified powers must be better understood.
I have only a brief mantric sentence for you; it has the significance of a dedication:
"I plunge myself into the pool of wisdom. From thence I come, bearing a knowledge of its mysteries for my fellowmen."
Seek during the next few months to understand not only the way a disciple must proceed, but seek to enter more deeply into the technique of understanding your brother's heart by a study of the duality of ray energies (personality and soul rays) which make him what he is in this incarnation.
June 1934
BROTHER OF OLD:
The past six months have seen you making much effort and the work of refining the vehicles is proceeding apace. You have still several more months of strenuous work before the personality can measure up to the demands ahead but your devotion and humility, your clear vision and your wisdom are such that you can be depended upon to make the grade.
There are two points of incipient glamour—faintly misty traces—which must be watched with care lest they form a thickening cloud between you and the sun. I specify them not lest in so doing I precipitate the cloud. Glamour is not dispelled by paying close attention to it. It disappears by the power of clear and steadfast meditation and the freeing of oneself from self attention. Can you grasp the significance of that paradoxical phrase? I but indicate a vague mirage which need never cause you trouble, provided you seek not self recognition, and that you love with pure purpose all those you meet.
During the next six months, your meditation work and the focus of your attention must be the stepping up of your awareness of the soul. You have an interesting and rather unusual problem; this is based on the fact that your consciousness shifts all the time from the lower to the higher mind, but often fails to touch the intermediate point, that of the soul on its own particular level. It is like this, my brother:
                                                ———— Higher mind.
                                    ——- Soul                     /
                                                                       /
                                                ———— Lower mind.
In the building of the antahkarana (at this stage) there is a gap in the bridge where the soul is and you jump from the lower to the higher Triad. This means a bridging from the highest point of the lower triad to the lowest point of the higher, the Spiritual Triad. Therefore, for you, there must be careful exercise in an elementary stage—the alignment of the soul and brain, via the mind. Work at that for a while with understanding, prior to doing your morning meditation. Make your meditation brief and quick. You have a habit of keeping the three "sacred points"—morning, noon and sunset. I am going to suggest that at those interludes in the day's activities you change your method considerably. I suggest that you work with colour more than with forms of words, such as seed thoughts, or with ideas. You are a natural occultist and have the key to the realm of ideas and the words of many books are in your mind. I would, therefore, suggest the following process:
1. Sound the O.M.
2. After you have worked for a few minutes at right alignment then:
a. At your morning meditation visualise a deep rose-coloured lotus. Build it with care and from its opening heart see a stream of rosy light (not red) pouring forth, engulfing you and your co-disciples.
b. At your noon meditation repeat the same symbolic work but this time with a yellow lotus.
c. At sunset again repeat the process only this time your lotus is of a deep electric blue with its heart a golden sun.
3. Use then the mantric sentence which I gave you in my last communication, pondering upon its meaning.
4. Proceed with your usual linking up with those you ever remember in your meditation, giving them strength and light and knowing yourself to be an intermediary.
5. Close with the invocation which you know and love so well:
"May the Holy Ones Whose disciple I am show me the light I seek; give me the strong aid of Their compassion and Their wisdom. There is a peace which passeth understanding; it abides in the hearts of those who live in the Eternal. There is a power which maketh all things new; it lives and moves in those who know the Self as one. May that peace brood over us, that power uplift us till we stand where the One Initiator is invoked, till we see His star shine forth."
6. Sound the O.M.
I particularly ask you to make your spiritual diary a more vital, more organised and more easily available document for the teaching of others. You have in it much of interest. It is, however, somewhat chaotic and the ideas in it are not easily understandable. Will you make it more sequential, synthetic and readable so that the arranged and presented ideas can be of service to other students? You have much to convey of occult knowledge and when you learn to write your knowledge, then your real service will begin to emerge.... Present what you have to offer; this can be much when you have learned with wisdom to externalise your knowledge.
January 1935
BROTHER OF MINE:
There is entering into your life a little discouragement, a faint inner disgust with yourself and a sense of failure which—if persisted in—may damage the beautiful thing you are building. Such thoughts are not constructive in their effect. In what does this discouragement arise?
It is to be found in your realisation that your inner knowledge far outstrips your outer usefulness. It grows out of your intelligent awareness that the inner worlds hold for you much of interest which you never bring through for use on the physical plane. This is so. You are a deeply versed occult student and your grasp of the inner occult realities far outstrips that of the average student. But it is all introverted; it does not emerge for the helping of the world; it is accumulating and piling up within you and, unless you make some definite use of it, you may bring about a condition which it will be difficult later to change. What causes this condition, my brother?
Three things which I, with frankness, will put before you because you can be trusted to take with gratitude anything that may be said. The test for you comes in the use you make of the information which I give you as with other knowledges you acquire.
1. Your inner sense of inferiority (a racial inheritance) is a definite handicap. In your executive life in a great city, this inferiority complex is negated a great deal because you see the fruits of your labour; but in the sensitive life of the inner planes, you succumb to it constantly; so great and so rapid is your reaction to the truth and to the inner realities that you promptly absorb much more than you can use. You are rendered almost dizzy by the radiant kaleidoscope of truth which you sense and contact.
2. You are handicapped by your physical body. You have inherited (for the fulfilment of karmic responsibilities) a not particularly high grade body of Slavic-Semitic type with a touch of the Latin intermixed. That heritage gives you your steadfastness and your persistence upon the Way; it gives you your sensitivity to things of the mystical realm; it gives you also your love of beauty and your heart development. It has revealed to you a little of the mystery of pain and of suffering. But it has also given you a physical body which has inherited the power to resist and the capacity to shut off the outer from the inner worlds of expression. Besides this, it has endowed you with a body of somewhat heavy and inert atoms which cannot be galvanised into the exquisite activity of which you dream except by tremendous effort and a self-imposed discipline of a drastic nature. Hence your soul's choice of your personality job—one that embodies service, that appeals to the heart and which at the same time is of so necessary a nature that it perforce calls forth your best effort.
3. The third cause of trouble is found in the fact that you are not making outer constructive use of the knowledge which you acquire in meditation, through wide reading and through your constant, interior thinking.
My attention has been called to your meditation reports. My brother, you touch and tap constantly the fount of wisdom. Your intuition is awake; your power to interpret symbols is unusual; your grasp of the synthetic plan of the Great White Lodge is real. But of what use is it to anyone? You are like a reservoir which is too full and from which there is not enough withdrawn to meet the need of the surrounding thirsty country. All flows over the spillway and is wasted.
This must be rectified, my brother. One of the first things we must do is to employ the knowledge and the occult information which is stored up in your sub-conscious mind and which finds expression only in your spiritual diary and your meditation reports. I refer not here to the daily life to be lived. I refer to the intelligent appreciation of truth which is yours, to the wealth of your occult information which is being wasted and causing conditions which will lead to eventual astral trouble. You do endeavour to live the life and to serve but I seek to see that service fed by your occult knowledge and by your head and not just by your heart. It is essential that we tap the reservoir and make your life fruitful as an esotericist.... What therefore, shall we do?
First, instead of constant meditation, you must employ the time so given to the enlarging upon and the writing out of the ideas which have come to you so that they can be used by others and can reach those who need help.... Expressed symbolically, what I have to say to you can be embodied in the words of an ancient Book of Rules for disciples which was extant at the time of the first Patanjali:
"The door opens into the world of that which can be known. It opens from the side of mind. Once open, there enters into thought the dropping rain of that which can be known. The other door opens through deep desire. It opens into the world which is that which all men know. When both the doors stand open wide, the disciple serves the purpose of the Lord of Truth. The rain drops on his heart from out the farthest door. He pours the rain of that which can be known into the world of that which all men know. Thus new thoughts can be carried into the hearts of men. Thus new flowers of ideas bring beauty to the dusty plains of earth."
In peace and understanding go your way to the Feet of the Great Ones.
July 1935
BROTHER OF OLD:
... Last time I communicated with you I gave you much. This time I need to give you but a little as you have yet to work out that which I have suggested. Above everything else aim at simplicity. The fertility of your mind is a great and useful gift, acquired through many lives of achieved knowledge. But a fertile garden and a rank wilderness are both of them expressions of fertility, but the one is beautiful and the other needs attention—an attention which has to be initiated by a definite process of destruction.
You have been used in the past months to institute a work which can be of real service and you have done well and have made possible future revelation. That is good and for that I thank you, my brother. I know that you do not ask for recognition but that is ever accorded by us, the teachers on the inner side, when duly merited. I can, therefore, tell you that your work is recognised.
But you have much to do within yourself before you can be used as fully as is possible. See that you, therefore, do three things:
1. Lose sight of yourself. Your constant inner habit of self-depreciation indicates too much concentration upon the little self. You are handicapping your work and negating a fuller influence by seeing yourself as a failure and yet at the same time omitting to take those steps which would make you a true success—steps which I have earlier indicated to you. For a time, my brother, lose sight of the time process as a whole and for three months work only one day at a time, making each hour of each day as beautiful and as selfless as possible.
2. The wisdom aspect in you is highly developed. Let the love aspect of the second ray now have fuller sway. You and F.C.D. have to reverse your life tendencies. He has a highly developed love nature and must learn to express wisdom more effectively. You have wisdom manifesting strongly and must learn to love more widely and not to fear love, as now you do. Your work as an executive has drawn forth your latent wisdom. Your work in my group and in the New Group of World Servers must now draw forth the deep resources of your heart. Ponder on this suggestion.
3. Give more definite help in the work.... You can give that which is needed, if you lose sight of yourself and can teach yourself to work with joyousness. Is not that the clue for you, my brother, the work of joyous service? May I ask you to cultivate the spirit of joy? If you give this more definite aid and work as it may be indicated to you, it will spell for you a large measure of release. You can aid in the work with your wisdom and ripe experience.
Adhere to the simple outline indicated by me in my previous communication. I cannot change it yet, for you have not yet availed yourself of the help I there sought to give to you. But be of good cheer and go forward with joy upon the Way. There is no time these fateful days for that lost effort which is connoted by too close a self-introspection and analysis, leading to distrust.
January 1936
The only thing which I seek to do for you at this time, my brother, is to give you a meditation which I will ask you to carry forward until further notice. I will give you also six seed thoughts for meditation. Otherwise my earlier injunctions to you hold good and your future usefulness in the coming spiritual expansion is dependent upon your careful attention to self-forgetfulness, the right use of love (enabling you to love more easily. Please study my last communication to you on this subject) and attention to practical, loving, efficient, regular service.
Your progress in the outer expression of your inner knowledge has been needlessly slow. Given a right and more focussed attitude, you could leap forward into clearer light and more efficient living. This oft I have told you. Your keynote for the future is discipline and again discipline. The reduction of the physical body to your will through the imposition of a pronounced ordered rhythm is your way out into liberation. It is, therefore, a question whether you care enough for the results possible to make the needed adjustments and impose the required disciplinary measures. What these are, you also know. Are they not simply the enforcing of certain rules of daily living which are so simple that they fail to evoke your will? It is the evocation of a dynamic will which I wish to bring about by the following suggested meditation.
1. After effective alignment and the centering of the consciousness in the mind, then proceed as indicated below:
O.M.
a. Sound this as the soul, in its own world, using the creative imagination as you do so.
b. Sound the O.M. again as the soul, imposing its purpose upon the mind.
c. Sound the O.M. as the soul, controlling the desire body.
d. Sound the O.M. as the soul, energising by its will force the etheric body.
e. Sound the O.M. again but this time with the cooperation of the personality, galvanising the physical body into right action. Do all this very slowly and thoroughly with a full, consecrated thought upon each of the five stages.
2. Then visualise the entire lower nature as being gathered up into the consciousness of the soul.
3. Then meditate for fifteen minutes (not more) upon the following six seed thoughts. This entire meditation is intended to be dynamic and brief. It can, if so used, break through obstructions and "clear the way" for the inflow of your dynamic but hitherto ineffective will.
1st month—My soul has purpose, power and will. These three are needed on the Way of Liberation.
2nd month—My soul must foster love among the sons of men. This is its major purpose. I, therefore, will to love and tread the Way of Love.
3rd month—The purpose of my soul must show itself through burning. That which obstructs and hinders must disappear before the power of God. That power am I. I, therefore, tread the Way unto the Burning Ground. There hindrances disappear.
4th month—My will is one with the great will of God. That will is mine today upon the planes of earth. It leads to service and my Master's group. I, therefore, tread the Way of Service after the festival of burning.
5th month—I dedicate myself to the purpose of the plan. I have no purpose but the will of God. I seek no other way but the Way of Divine Fulfilment. I lose myself within the group which seeks the furtherance of the plan.
6th month—The Way of Sacrifice is eternally the Way of Joy. The Way of Joy leads to the Place of Peace. The peace of God is only found in losing sight of self and seeing naught but that which must be done and done today.
June 1936
MY BROTHER AND MY FRIEND:
Much that I have written to S.C.P. is also of prime importance to you. I refer not to it here as I have other things about which I wish to speak to you. I urge you from my heart (which enfolds you in its constant love) to look away from yourself and dwell not with such constancy upon your failures to achieve. Recognise failure—if it is there—but then with a face lifted to the light and a smile upon your lips, turn your back upon such failure and go with steadfastness forward.
D.A.O., a member of my group of disciples, learns not with ease the lesson of self-discipline, and the glamour of the fear of authority has descended upon her. She has asked permission to leave my group and for some one else to function in her place. I am suggesting to her that she regard herself as suspended from her group endeavour and from my so-called control and take one year for careful thought, prior to taking a final decision. To prove to you that your failure is basically superficial I am asking you to do for me a definite service. I could not so ask you if you had failed. For the space of a year I would ask you to take over the work and place of D.A.O. in my group and so help preserve the integrity of the group relationship. This is not the first time that you have done this and hence my immediate thought of you. But though instinctively my mind decided to ask this service of you, I have a twofold reason. You have a surety of touch and a freedom from glamour which is sorely needed by the immediate associates of D.A.O. in my group. You succumb somewhat yourself to the glamour of failure but are seldom glamoured where the principles of group work are concerned. I can trust you to give what is needed. Secondly, you have a clarity of vision which is true and constructive—in those cases where your personality love is not involved. Where it is involved, you are prone to over-estimate the loved ones and see too much for them. Is this not so, my brother?
In this case however, your vision will be clear and true. So take the place of D.A.O. and give of your best in the situation. But vacate not your own place in my group.
D.A.O.'s concept of freedom—as is the case with all such concepts—can act as a prison. Her idea of liberty can be a chain, holding her down. This is the lesson she must learn. Her service in my group comes second to her love of her own progress and this I shall have to point out to her. Disciples, working in an Ashram, are none of them entirely free agents. Each is held by a soul link to his co-disciples. Responsibility undertaken and karmic relationships recognised cannot be lightly set aside and must ultimately be worked out. The discipline of the group life is a higher living discipline than any self-imposed ideas of life and truth. When a disciple sees and relates his individual dharma and his group responsibility—then he can take right action.
Will you assist me in this problem? I know you will, my brother. And will you take this as an evidence of my faith and trust in you and also as evidence of the needless astral anxiety under which you so constantly labour?
One small personal task I ask of you also. Please go back over all the instructions you have received from me and list the specific information I have given you anent your actions upon the physical plane. Then note what you have succeeded in doing and what still remains to be done. This will help you to renew your efforts to master the physical body which is the vehicle which gives you the most trouble and which can be brought to heel far more easily than the astral or mental bodies. Yet it is this body in this incarnation which gives you the most difficulty. If you mastered it, your work would forge ahead.
January 1937
BROTHER:
I seek to start with a word of commendation to you. You have progressed this past year and have passed out of a relatively static condition into one of increased sensitivity and growth. Having in the past pointed out to you your failures and having frequently had the need to analyse you to yourself in terms of reproof, it fills me with joy to register in you growth and an increasing ability to move forward. Let me tell you now that three years ago, I viewed your condition with questioning as to whether or not you had reached your highest point of attainment for this life and would (for the remainder of your years on earth) simply hold that which has been gained. No light achievement, my brother, given the equipment with which you started upon the Path three lives ago, but not indicating your highest possibility which is to be based upon the work done in your last life on earth. Go forward now to greater heights of achievement in self-forgetfulness and in love, and become increasingly a tower of strength and a source of illumining wisdom to your co-disciples.
I have for you two words. One of them is based upon the instructions which I have given you in the past and which I will summarise by saying: Submit your physical plane life to discipline, self-imposed; adhere to that discipline at all costs. You can outline that discipline adequately for yourself. There is no need for me to do so.
The second message I have is based upon a comment you yourself made to me that you have permitted your life to be ruled by expediency and habit but not by plan. I would ask you to ponder deeply upon that sentence, asking you to apply it and carry the concept to the higher life of service and not just to a disciplined life, ordered and ruled by your own imposed plan but to that service to which this group of disciples is pledged. This lifts the whole theme out of the realm of the personality life and will fill your thought life with the vastness of our plan.
All of you know so much. Your theory is so good and sound. But your practice should begin to be commensurate with your theory if this group is to go forward as desired into real world work. Let rapid adjustment take place and a fresh dedication and re-alignment among all of you so that, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder and with eyes fixed upon the same vision, you can face life and its vicissitudes together and thus lighten each others' way. This is not always the case.
Therefore, my brother, let the plan itself mould your life and its activities and let discipline produce the instrument which is needed for the work to be done. Groups of disciples today are being trained in telepathic work and are rendering telepathic service to the world—a tiny replica of the work which the Hierarchy is ever doing with the minds of men. Thus, when you start to do this, you can work to change conditions and to affect certain lives. This work will not be truly possible where criticism, self-pity or wrong speech exist, for one person could block the outflow of the group thought. Therefore, I am asking my group of disciples this year to prepare for expanding service and to brood deeply upon the work of thought transmission in world service.
The occult phrases which I have for your consideration are as follows:
"The blueprint lay before the Master Workman and the plan, in all its detail, lay disclosed upon the Trestle Board. Within the Middle Chamber waited those who had to build the Temple according to the plan laid down.
"But the plan was not complete. Some knowledge of the ground plan upon which the Temple must be reared was lacking and he who sought it and he who had it were not there. The Master Workman waited.
"The one who sought the needed knowledge, who guided those who laid the ground for later building, he slept and ate and played upon the outer plain. And yet at every hour, his thought was focussed in the Middle Chamber of the waiting artisans and recollection came. His soul at moments hovered o'er the blueprints in the Inner Room and looked the Master Workman in the face. And still the Master waited. Then recollection came and active work."
July 1937
MY BROTHER:
You have, as you have oft been told by me, only one major problem and that is connected with your physical body. Let me indicate to you your ray forces and then, I believe, increased light will be thrown upon your problem.
Your mental body is a first ray one and this is what makes you a real occult student. Your soul's contact is so definite and real that your mental body builds no barriers between the soul and your personality or between you and your co-disciples. Mentally, you always understand and are inclusive. I do not mean theoretically but in fact. But your astral body is also upon the first ray which is an unique occurrence and rarely to be found. It is here that the sense of separateness enters in, for that first ray tendency does to you two things:
a. It feeds your sense of separativeness and thus tends to isolate you.
b. It fosters your fear of attachment.
Thus you are oft emotionally and astrally detached and isolated from those who love you and from your fellowmen. Hence there is a continuing conflict between your loving soul and your isolated, lonely, astral vehicle. The solution will be immediately clear to you.
Your physical body is on the seventh ray. Ponder, therefore, the interior relations and the exterior effect of your ray forces as tabulated below:
1. The soul ray—the second Ray of Love-Wisdom.
2. The personality ray—the third Ray of Active Intelligence.
3. The ray of the mind—the first Ray of Power.
4. The ray of the astral body—the first Ray of Power.
5. The ray of the physical body—the seventh Ray of Ceremonial Order.
You will note how much your soul has to do with the lines of energy which are all definitely related to the first ray: 1-3-7. You will consequently be encouraged also to note how much your life of love does control your work and service. I am aware of it. Am I commending you or stimulating you, my brother? Perhaps both. Dwell much in thought upon these facts in the months which lie ahead.
January 1938
MY BROTHER OF OLD:
What am I to say to you? If I remind you not that the need is for you to submit your lower nature to discipline, you would have for me no respect for I would not be a true friend and teacher. If I remind you of this need I then but increase your responsibility which is not the act of a true friend and teacher.
Disciples come definitely into the aura of the Hierarchy. You are a disciple. Disciples evoke from us who are the teachers upon the inner side of life many and diverse reactions. We look at some of you and feel that much time must elapse before we can fully trust you with our confidence; integration, wisdom and soul contact must first be induced. Others emerge into the hierarchical Light and we know—as we study them—that though there is contact and knowledge there is also ambition, violence and selfishness and that these qualities must be offset and subdued before there can be freedom of action, both on our part and on theirs. Others again are lovely in themselves with a high and sweet vibration but they are weak and full of fear, sorrowful or weighed down with care; they have to be taught the way of strength and of divine carelessness before their service can measure up to demand. Others again come into our sphere of influence who are integrated, wise, trustworthy and with far more than the average capacity to serve and to prove useful. Their power to live, to influence and to serve is very great. Yet in some one part of their nature there is weakness and their expression is limited. That weakness could be so easily offset, given sufficient illumined desire and spiritual will (qualities present but unused). Such a disciple are you, my brother and my comrade of long standing. Your major hindrance is in your physical body which refuses discipline and hitherto has bested all your efforts. This you know and to this you refer with a sense of blinding failure. How can I help you, therefore, when you know the causes of hindrance, the obstacles to wider influence and the nature of the problem which you have to solve?
There is nothing that I can do beyond telling you that once you have brought your physical nature into line with the demand of your soul, that you have far more to give than the average disciple. You have wisdom and much experience, individual and racial. You have a deep love, of which you are afraid and, therefore, fail to express as you might and which your executive work has cramped and hindered. You have seasoned occult understanding which can do much for others. You have a magnetic radiance. But there is ever a point beyond which you seem unable to go—a point at which the physical body intervenes and refuses to become a clear channel for the expression of the inner beauty and radiance.
Having pointed this out, having begged you to bring this aspect of yourself into line with spiritual demand and having indicated the wider field of service which could open up before you, I have to leave you to succeed in the task or to refuse to undertake it as seems to you best. Perhaps later, I shall see a pronounced change—full alignment and heightened radiance.
I would ask you to take much time each Sunday (for an hour at least) in the attempt to contact my aura and, through that, the aura of the Hierarchy. The results of this effort should be vital to you and of importance in handling your problem. I leave you with the last words of the occult phrases I gave you a year ago:
"Then recollection came and active work."
I trust that soon that will be the statement which I shall be enabled to make anent you and not the usual earlier one, "and still the Master Workman waited."
January 1939
MY BROTHER AND MY FRIEND:
What can I say that I have not already said? I can remind you of the interesting fact that every one of the forces of your personality is on the first great line of power, of isolation and of separativeness. The only second ray influence through which love can come is your soul and the implications of this you are apt to misunderstand. Therefore, your life of love is dependent upon the extent of your soul contact and that contact must be kept living and vital or else your personality idea, your desire to hold people away from you, your sense of isolation and of pride will dominate. The difficulty is enhanced for you owing to the fact that the ray which governs your race is the third ray and that also governs your personality far more strongly than you realise. Therefore the age-old separativeness of your racial background will increase your sense of withdrawing from all personality contacts. It will place the glamour before your eyes that the only contacts possible for you are those reached via the soul. If that were truly so, my brother, why be in a physical body at all, why be in a group of disciples, why be so much loved by those around you? Your co-disciples love you and give you, as much as they can, the love of their souls. Those who are near you on the physical plane give you also personality love and devotion. The first you accept with pride and understanding; the second you reject with pride and no understanding.
Before you can claim the full prerogatives of an accepted disciple (which you are) you must penetrate behind the screen or the shutter of your personality and become aware of the violence of your true feeling on the question of racial differences, of social standing, of class distinctions and of personality affections. There is in you what amounts almost to an inhibited hatred. It is partly racial, partly European, and partly a totally unnecessary sense of social and personal inferiority. You assure yourself that it is not there. You refuse to recognise it with great deliberation. You say to yourself: I am all love and understanding because I am a soul. And you very frequently are a soul and your influence is soul influence. But behind all this lies a blind spot. It is a "sticking your head into the sand" type of glamour, and a refusal to register your personality limitations along this line. You, with your wisdom and soul contact, could most easily handle this, if you so desired.
I am speaking to you thus frankly, my brother, because I have confidence in you and I know that you have confidence in me. I have confidence also in the love of your group brothers for you.
Your problem must be approached differently to that of your co-disciples. It is much more difficult, owing to the unusual fact that your astral body is on the first ray. Your personality ray, the third, is focussed in your astral body, adding to its power, its glamour, and its hold on you. Your problem is to call in the energy of the soul in such potency that it will drive out the first ray force and leave you, at the close of this incarnation, with a second ray astral body.
The meditation I would give you is based on the words "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." I would have you, therefore, think out with care the differences that would appear in your personality expression if you had a second ray astral body. I will also set you the task of writing out for me, my brother, a paper in which you will emphasise the characteristics of a second ray astral body. You will then endeavour each day to build in these second ray qualities. They are built in through the second ray methods of love, contact, attraction, understanding, sympathy and compassion. The latter two qualities are almost totally lacking in your equipment and your career as an executive director has necessarily enhanced this defect. I would remind you that I did not say that you lacked love. You used, in the past, to supplement this defect by an intuitive appreciation of people but lately you have hardened in one direction—that of sympathy—and crystallised into a racial pattern which is not yours; it is based on the development of the heart centre which has, as yet, only opened in the direction of your own people and towards Masonry.
Will you give ten minutes each morning to the exercise which I here outline.... Then seek brain-mind alignment with the soul and see the love of your soul pouring into your personality, transmuting its force and working through on to the physical plane. It will express itself as personality love, actuated and directed by soul love. Can you see the picture, my brother, as I see it? Perfect love casteth out fear. Your personality is not on the line of love but of power. It fears love and the expression of love. In this statement I have given you a slant on your soul problem.
Your co-disciples love and will love you increasingly. At present, you do not let them love you and you misunderstand and misinterpret them. Where there is little real love, there is little true comprehension. When you function as a soul, you love much and quite impersonally. You are not yet a Master, however, and so able to give impersonal love without hurting. Therefore, there is need for you to love personally also. I will aid you where I can and I give you my personal love—my impersonal love has always been yours.
NOTE: Nothing has stopped this disciple from active cooperation with the Tibetan and with the group of His disciples.
To W. D. S.
November 1937
What shall I say to you, my brother and my friend, that will do for you two things: First of all, give you confidence in the rightness of your choice of a field of service, and, secondly, strengthen your will so that you can stand as a tower of strength to others? Are these not the two things which you desire and which constitute your aim, and do you not require assurance on these points, or is it re-assurance?
Go forward, my brother, looking not behind but with your eyes fixed in steadfastness upon the Way of a world Server. It is a hard way, with many ups and downs, and many steep hills and valleys of shadow, but there is rest and shade in the valley and sunshine on the hills. These difficulties your Master knows, for He, too, has found the way hard, when He travelled it. In speaking thus, I refer not to myself; I am only your teacher and your friend.
Your life lesson is detachment, and—in order to practise detachment as a disciple should—you need to strengthen your will to be. This I think you know. You are a second ray soul in a first ray personality sheath or vehicle. Your effort this life has ever been to love, to serve and to understand; this has been the outstanding gesture of your soul this incarnation. Now must come the effort of your personality will towards directed orientation. The divine aspect of your personality this life and the major integrating factor is your will. Self-will you have negated, through love. This you have achieved, and it is well to recognise it. But the integrating will of the personality, subordinated to the will of the soul, must be developed and used with due detachment. In these few words I state your immediate problem. Ponder upon them, for in their understanding will come increased capacity to serve. This capacity I know that you seek, and the door of service stands wide open and you are needed where you stand.
Strength to stand; strength to love; strength to be detached—these are and should be your objectives. For you, in this connection, it is the evocation of the spiritual will (as it is applied to the personality and its problems and as it acts as the directing agency in the brain) which must be your immediate objective.
To this end, I suggest that you preface the group meditation which I am asking all of you to do with the following brief exercise:
1. Take six long breaths, slowly and without effort, or any inflation of the abdomen. After the last breath say, with thought and consciousness alert: I am an expression of the Will of God. That Will directs my thoughts and guides me in the purposes of my soul. To that Will I hold.
Interlude of Exhalation.
2. Take six more long breaths in a similar manner and then say: Let this divine intelligent Will govern my heart, and lead me in the Way of Love. In this Way I will to go.
Interlude of Exhalation.
3. Again take six long breaths and then say: Let this divine intelligent loving Will direct my brain and service on the outer plane of Life. With my Will, I will to serve.
Interlude of Exhalation.
Will you also take six seed thoughts out of any book you care to choose and write down these six seed thoughts—one for each month? Take one, therefore, each month for careful reflection during the day, as you proceed upon your life service. At the end of each month send in the thought on which you have been pondering, with the gist of your reflection, for the helping of your group brothers.
You will note from the above that I am endeavouring to prepare you, as well as the other newly chosen group members, for quick participation in the group work.
April 1938
MY BROTHER AND MY FRIEND:
You are entering—if you so choose—upon an extended period of service. The questions before you are: Will you serve as and how service is needed? Or will you serve as you believe you can and should? These questions are basic and can only be answered aright by your endeavouring anew to grasp the vision as a whole. I refer not here only to the vision of the many groups, serving in the world today and fulfilling their rightful function. That, they can and will do. But I refer to the vision of the Plan as it exists in the consciousness of the New Group of World Servers. It is interesting for you to realise that the Plan exists in four states of consciousness:
1. As it is visioned and known by the Members of the Hierarchy, such as the accepted disciples of the world.
2. As it exists in the consciousness of the members of the New Group of World Servers, stepped down into their minds and desires.
3. As it exists in the consciousness of the men of goodwill.
4. As its faint outlines are found in the minds of the average intelligent God-accepting men of the world at this time.

I would like to emphasise to you the necessity for your definitely grasping the Plan as the New Group of World Servers grasp it, pondering on it and identifying yourself with it. At present, you grasp the Plan as the men of goodwill grasp it: your grasp is not that of the New Group of World Servers who see the group as an emanating point; the man of goodwill sees himself as the emanating point. Between these two positions there is a vast difference—the difference between a centralised consciousness and a decentralised consciousness. The efficacy and the efficiency of all your future service depends upon your understanding this distinction, for it is vital and real.

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