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Discipleship in the New Age I - Talks to Disciples - Part IX
This visualizing process and this use of the imagination form the first two steps in the activity of thought-form building. It is with these self-created forms - embodying spiritual ideas and divine purpose - that the Masters work and hierarchical purpose takes shape. Therefore, my disciples, it is essential that you begin with deliberation and slowly to work in this manner and to use the above information constructively and creatively. The need of the times is increasingly great and the utmost of work and of purpose is desired. The goal of initiation is held out by the Masters to all their disciples and they stand ready to give the needed instruction. I would remind you at this early stage that only that which you know for yourself and experience consciously within yourself is of importance and constitutes the truth for you. That which may be told you by others, even by me, serves no vital purpose, except to enhance or corroborate an already known truth, or to create illusions or responsibility until it is either rejected or experienced by you in your own consciousness. Do you understand what I mean? Initiation might be defined at this point as the moment of crisis wherein the consciousness hovers on the very borderline [92] of revelation. The demands of the soul and the suggestions of the Master might be regarded as in conflict with the demands of time and space, focused in the personality or the lower man. You will have, therefore, in this situation a tremendous pull between the pairs of opposites; the field of tension or the focus of the effort is to be found in the disciple "standing at the midway point." Will he respond and react consciously to the higher pull and pass on to new and higher areas of spiritual experience? Or will he fall back into the glamor of time and space and into the thralldom of the personal life? Will he stand in a static quiescent condition in which neither the higher trend nor the lower pull will affect him? One or other of these three conditions must distinguish him and must succeed upon an earlier and vacillating experience wherein the disciple vibrates between the higher and the lower decisions. It is at this process, the Master presides. He is able to do nothing because it is the disciple's own problem. He can only endeavor to enhance the desire of the soul by the power of his directed thought. The personality can also do nothing, for at this point both the physical body and the astral vehicle are simply automatons, waiting responsively for the decision of the disciple, functioning in his mental body. Only the disciple can act upon the mental level of consciousness at this point of endeavor. Once he does so, the die is cast. He either moves forward towards the door of light where the Master takes his hand and the Angel of the Presence becomes potent and active in a way which I may not describe to you, or he drops back temporarily into the life condition of the lower man; glamor and maya settle down anew upon him and the Dweller on the Threshold inserts himself between the disciple and the light from the open door and renews activity. The disciple either awakens suddenly to a wider grasp of reality and a deeper understanding of the Plan and his part in it, or the "veils of earth" close over his head; the vision fades and he reverts into the life of an ordinary human being, probably for the period of the incarnation wherein the opportunity was offered to him. Should he, however, go forward through that door, then (according to the initiation which becomes possible) will be the revelation and its attendant consequences. The revelation will not the [93] revelation of possibilities. It is a factual experience, resulting in the evocation of new powers and capacities and the recognition of new modes and fields of service. These powers are conditioned by past developments and the presence of these capacities, plus a freedom of movement "within the bounds of the Hierarchy" which lie far beyond anything which he may have dreamed, become his. New hierarchical contacts are now possible to him; new responsibility is laid upon his shoulders and new "fields of potency" become available for his use in world service.
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