462

THE SHARING OF CONSTANCY

The greatest desire in every human breast, no matter how it may be articulated, is for one or another form of security. It is because of this desire that the way to eternal life, as well as to ultimate destruction, is so clearly marked. When the direction of living is of the latter order the desire for security takes the form of a frantic co-operation with every possible manifestation or sterility or staying put in the superficial realm of sense. And this of course is an end to all progress. But when the direction of living is a way to eternal life the desire for stability then takes the form of a fellowship in stabilities or constancies of human character. No individual ever achieved his salvation alone because it is only as a two or three are gathered together in some definite group entity that a greater dimension of reality and existence is possible. We are dependent on an eternal association with living entities of our own order in any reality of more than transient or surface individualism.

The philosophy of this presents no great difficulties to a student. In the way that embodiment or a physical actuality is the necessity of self-wholeness, so the larger embodiment or spiritual actuality is the necessity of the larger wholeness or the group. There is no tangible body for a group and no moving out of individual embodiment to enter a greater physical reality but there is a transfer from a smaller to a larger order of stability and constancy with a realization of the sustainment in the invisible or group organism. Into the organism as far as the individuality is concerned goes everything that is individual transcendency or a higher constant, and this going is an eternal sharing of the constancy in a recognition of constancies.

There is a steadiness to be gained from associating with others of like mind, like aspiration, and a magic to be experienced through the fellowship of high purpose

1057

MAN AS AN ENTITY

Man is not an entity that exists in any total insulation from everything else around as far as his own actual identity may hold to what it is in and of itself, and the consequences of this fact have curious psychological ramifications. Everyone is aware that he is in a certain discrete sense somewhat and somehow in himself a basic actuality with no dependence on others or the cosmos generally or what may be the background and genetic continuity of his person in blood inheritance. This pure ego however is spiritual or in no way material and in other words is a complete immediacy without existence in a time and space framing in which the notion of existing alone has meaning. The inner ego in consequence is unable to think about itself or to know it has existence in the way anything else has existence. We continually clarify our views of things in any ultimate description by remembering that anything actually is what it does and that the simple doing is at the root of any given basic existence in question. At the core of an existence in this sense is unity, or a self-at-center that defeats any possible self-contemplation and thus self knows itself in other selves at all points and never in any operation of separation from them.

The above paragraph is perhaps as fruitless as any other paragraph or attempt at greater or lesser length to say what never can really be said directly or clearly. When being is described it is in terms of what it is to something other than itself, and description as a result is in terms of only an approximation. Man cannot truly have experience in the sense that he is having it privately or in lineament wholly his own, and his consciousness as arising out of experience can involve himself only as it also and wholly involves others.

A man's consciousness arises from his experience with others, and thoughtful retrospection of his encounters provides him with the key to knowledge of himself.

703

PROGRESS INVOLVES CHOICES

Participation in a spiritual group is a means neither of escaping from the stern realities of life on one hand nor of expanding some species of magic compulsion on mundane affairs on the other. It is fundamentally a means for having experience of ideal proportion and so strengthening every member for meeting life's problems squarely and in the direct terms of everyday reality. Nothing can ever change the reality that is accepted continually into experience, and practical or everyday living always has enough of its own carry-over to keep an experience in existence as long as it is secretly feared or cherished as a means for self-justification. Life is mastered as its significance is changed and this is possible only by a vicarious experience such as builds it into a larger scheme of reality. The group activity is the means for a vicarious reconstruction of all experience, not through an escape or any species of short cuts as has been said but by the making of better and more intelligent choices.

The man who comes from a happy and sympathetic home will have an inestimable advantage over anyone in competition with him when that other one has no recourse but to the strife and criticism of some altogether different home environment. The spiritual group is a home of values and end objectives where happiness is experienced through an unceasing making of choices and decisions or a continual self-rectification. The spiritual seeker is not excused from everyday duties and not exempt from every real stress and strain of existence, but he will never lack the opportunity to look these over in the light of broadening experience or deeper meaning. He is shown how to use his experience rather than surrender to its buffeting.

Group participation provides the ideal spiritual experience that makes possible better choices in solving the problems of everyday.

320

THE STUDENTS AND THE WORLD

The group must be said to gain importance from those who make it up rather than the reverse. Always there will be individuals who prefer to lean on others than on their own inner resources, and we will always have many of this sort for the reason that we accept every seeking soul who comes to us. But it is important that membership in the group of itself be unimportant and insignificant before the world. To the superficial point of view it might seem that the group has made possible the success of the many in its fellowship who have been lifted up from nothing or almost nothing to very much indeed, but truly in every case it has been the support and sustainment of the potentiality of all given individuals that have had a favorable result. Close association with quickened personalities is an advantage but in the fellowship are always also the many who have not caught the idea of it or even the first real stimulation of true selfhood. Too, there are the many who with first stirring are bound to find fault with everything.

No man is prejudged in a spiritual group. Thus occultism that is valid opens its doors to all. Constructive criticism may seem to be judgment, though it is not final or given from above but is instead the operation of a spiritual give-and-take whereby the seekers define each other through common orientations for common participation in the group organism. In this fashion a genuine occultism tests its aspirants automatically and unconsciously by throwing them against the problems of the world to reveal the stuff of which they are made. In invisible fellowship the reality is individual and tested by events in every detail, although the fellowship itself is spiritual. We therefore appear before the world through our dedicated personalities.

The group consciousness sustains the spiritual outreach of every participant, but his grasp must be tested and proven in the world of everyday.

902

OUR COMMONPLACENESS AND UNIQUENESS

As the group organism we are a spiritual commonplace and differ in no respect whatsoever from any other social aggregate in the general pattern of things once we as other like bodies have cultured a true inner or immortal fellowship. The basis of our spirituality may be rationalized in any fashion we like provided we keep our foundation firm in some rhythm of faithful and vivifying interest in what we make of ourselves collectively. We are useful to those souls to whom this familiar form of spiritual communion is congenial and in addition is a definite stimulus to personal plussage. For anyone else we are empty or offer nothing, and this fact may be important since every effort to project meaning that isn't valid into some given complex of experience may destroy all opportunity to establish the validity elsewhere. The necessity to stress over and over again that we are not a cult or sect or secret society is because to encourage such an identification would be to invite comparison or sanction a superficial scaling of spiritual organisms such as ours in terms of excellence or power and thus to end up with a foundation in rationalized rather than experienced reality.

We are unique in declining to be different in any way in terms of distinction that has meaning or importance primarily to those not participating in an actuality of the fellowship. Individually we achieve an excellence that in our own consciousness is fruitage of the immortality that we practice assiduously in and through the fellowship of the group but that in the eyes of the world is importantly and very obviously a result of our individual effort. In the collective phase of our spiritual activities we primarily sustain the matrix in which a gestative rebirth is continual rebirth of inwardness and practicality.

What seems to the world to be an individual accomplishment, and properly so, is in truth the fruit of an experience of spiritual fellowship.

249

A MIND FILLED WITH COSMIC ISSUES

It is extremely difficult to put a finger on every value gained from a spiritual association with other seekers, at least whenever any effort is made to define this or to explain it to other minds and other points of view. So elusive is the real substance of higher living that the more earnest seeker will at times wonder if what he is pursuing has any genuine reality at all. Such doubts are healthy because they lead to a revaluation of the quest, and because no spiritual quest is actual if it does not insist on revaluing at every step on the path. Physical things may be taken for granted, but eternal ones require an inner constancy of attention. In the course of attainment the selfhood is consistently enlarged, and with every enlargement must go an expansion of perspective or an expansion that requires new valuation by its very nature. Were the spiritual quest merely a thing of everyday progress, the consistent lack of objective stability would be most distressing. But as no man expects a sunset ever to be restored or the particular smile or glance of a loved one ever to confess inner poverty by senseless duplication of such a cosmic moment, so spiritual things are evanescent in the light of everyday.

The stability in the life of the seeker is manifest only in the very illusiveness of the signatures of divine notice. In time he discovers that his own affairs prosper always as though harmonizing easily and naturally with the cosmic plan for his destiny and yet this plan itself never is caught in words, or given actual definition. He has a mind too filled with cosmic issues to seek foundation in any issue of his own. As God confides responsibility in him he increasingly cedes responsibility to God. This is the fellowship of joy.

The aspirant who is single-minded in his concern for his cosmic destiny finds that lesser matters tend to settle themselves.

711

THE REAL IS SELF-ACTUATED

The effort of all organization as spiritually understood is to offer the seeking inspiration a chance to act out of its own inner motivation. Therefore the basic ideal in a spiritual group is to avoid all administrative direction as far as this is possible. There is no one more basic characteristic of the Sabian Assembly than my demand that it run itself in practically every particular and that there be no particular compulsion put on the students as individuals or as a whole over and above some absolutely minimal essentials. When an individual student in his flush of new enthusiasm becomes filled with an idea that sweeps him off his feet as he feels what can be done through some work other than the Sabian instrumentation, he often seeks to get the inner revivification of his own special notion by promoting a flow of the whole Sabian channelship into this new interest of his and thus instinctively tries to make the Sabian work the tail to this new kite. This is self-defeating if he only would see it since he seeks to get a new strength for his own spiritual freedom by denying it altogether or limiting it by seeking to control it for the others from whom he gains the real support for it in his own case. The real is self-actuating, and any interest given by others must be as spontaneous as his. This means that he must be true to the Sabian ideal, which is that any work in life whether individual or group must have its own motivation only.

Sabian students are expected to have an interest in each facet of life about them, and to take real part in every enterprise of worth or even lesser worth that concerns them. Everything at hand is inner vivification if it is real, and thus of Sabian significance, but this is never justification for an attempt to divert Sabian energies.

The student acts in response to his own spiritual motivation and to any quickening provided by life as well, but always responds in kind.

218

THE OUTER ROLE IN GREATER PURPOSE

As we take our initial step in our outer role in greater purpose, inaugurating an endeavor to make the world safe for living as expressed in a 1932 challenge, it is necessary that first we gain some measure of real sense of our outer role. A cause for a group such as ours, which refuses to be any sort of group in the usual sense of that word but persists in leaving all of its members entirely free in every direction of self-expression, obviously must be a cause wholly spiritual in nature, or one that will concentrate consciousness in the realm of individual achievement rather than in group satisfactions. It can hardly be too strongly stressed, as the outer structure of our service takes form, that the ultimate dedication of self is not as much to the group as through the group to that which the group vivifies for all in its fellowship and that as a consequence is more or less diversely put before himself by each student. Our outer role is fundamentally that sort of contribution to life as entire that was represented in ancient days by the Pythagoreans or a cultivation of individual genius that to the world is an individual and not a group matter. The literal group to which the name Pythagoreans was given did not survive actually to a point of appreciable contact but its deeper tradition, as an invisible survival and sustaining power, came down through medieval times to become perhaps the whole unsuspected foundation of the Renaissance.

This can well be a series of letters on the subject that is truly vital to us. The setting up of headquarters as the tangible centralization of a spiritual work in a physical center is as fatal to such a work as any possible factor, which the history of all movements of this sort shows, and so here we have seen our way clearly.

The group exists to assist each individual in honing his powers to a point of excellence that fits him for making a positive contribution to life in general.

219

TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR LIVING

The elimination of group satisfactions as such cannot be too greatly emphasized in spiritual work. Hence it would be entirely possible for our objective to make the world safe for living to become changed imperceptibly into a program to make the world safe for us who are seeking to make the world safe for living, and at long last to become the program to make the world safe for us who when we are safe at least propose to try to make the world safe for living, on and on with every twist of sophistry by which souls encouraged in their conviction of importance are enabled to confuse their own well-being with that to which they have committed themselves. What the world needs is not an improvement in the condition of each agency for the improvement of the whole but rather a freeing of men from agencies as far as agencies are more important in their own eyes than that which in each case has been the reason for their being. The test of all aggregation of human effort must lie in its immediate contribution to human well-being, as an aesthetic if not a physical contribution of course. A building for a future goal is justified only by a present benefit in passing, for unless there is a contribution by the way there is no essential touch of reality. The whole can remain a dream, a delusion.

I have no wish to make these letters too strong, but yet you must see that the temperament that lives wholly and entirely in an intangible future is the temperament to which the present offers nothing but seems empty or devoid of human feeling. Humanity has secured in modern civilization as current civilization manifests itself an old man of the sea and the cruel pincers of varied parasitic organizations on the neck of humanity must be loosened if safety is to return to us.

Eventual large success is marked by smaller cumulative successes along the way. A remote hope is not a substitute for present accomplishment.

237

THE IMPLANTATION OF IDEALS

Our steadfast refusal to organize the work, in the usual sense of that term, is hardly as incomprehensible to the average seeker as is a second necessary step in understanding of our purposes generally or our equally constant insistence on a physical or outer group just about as tangibly and literally administered as if it were organized in the conventional sense. The trouble is, of course, a problem of emphasis. Organization is an emphasis of structure, whereas group work in a spiritual sense is an emphasis of communion. Organization, or the institutionalism that so many thinkers understand must create a self-preservation as the first law of its being, is self-righteous and self-destructive because its emphasis is material with its values nonexistent in any realm of service. Thus the man in life who seeks always to save his own skin, and to spare himself effort and worry, will slowly and surely subtract himself from the greater meaning in life to a truly self-destructive extent. If organizations could forever keep their emphasis on their service, their opportunities in a larger realm of being, they would prove eternally useful. Such an organization in fact is the organism of nature, as the body of man. The limbs or any of the parts of this body have no consciousness in organization of any difference between them. The greater entity does not sustain them as individuals in differentiation. This is what I mean by group.

The group is not meant to destroy individuality. Truly its first purpose is to enhance individuality, but in and of the group there is always effort to dissipate all differentiation and to hold up the greater entity within which the implantation of ideals by students within each other may proceed with real facility.

Each individual is a member of the body of which he is a part, performing his characteristic functions that facilitate the articulation of the whole.

211

EXPANDED PERSONALITY OF AN IDEA

Since there is no weight of organization in our work, an inevitable question becomes exactly what is the weight or the load and burden for the carrying of which we are associated together. Also in the same breath a newcomer frequently asks what is the exact nature of the one-man administration or authority of the Assembly. Because the underlying objective is the training or refinement of character, it is obvious that the group is a conditioning or catalyzing agency and that its function is the encouragement of those qualities in its membership that it offers as an ideal in its teaching and instruction. For this reason any setting up of lesser or unnecessary functions is divergence from its major work. A one-man administration of things preserves an ideal unity of the group because a group of this sort is like a sphere in the fact that position on one part of it is different from no other position, except in superficial and so inconsequential pattern, and in the fact that a sphere can have but one center. Centrality cannot be divided or delegated. As a matter of fact, the conditioning that the student receives is only about half the process. In equal degree the group is being conditioned by him. The ideals of the group are not a creation of the center, but of the whole. It is as truly a privilege of the student to condition the group as it is the group's function to condition him. The whole progress of the group is to be found in the accession of new blood powerful enough to uplift the whole, and in the growth of old blood into a new power that is no less an accession.

I try to carry the group along to the ideals we have set before us, but most of the time the students carry me and then I think that the expanded personality of an idea is the real burden we carry.

As the individual grows into the ideals of the group, the group grows into the refinement of its ideals, a reciprocity that enriches both.

212

THE POWER OF IDEALIZED OBJECTIVES

A good question in the light of the Blue Letter leading to the immediate discussion might well be precisely where does the expanded personality of an idea reside. Obviously I did not suggest it found its point of residence in my own person, nor did I intend to encourage the idea that I was some sort of an appointed messenger. The twenty years of Sabian instruction, in the regular cycle, should dramatize the fact that a sense of humor is better than illumination, if a choice has to be made between one and the other and it always has been made clear that spiritual grace does not descend on man because of any divine impulse but only through the growth of the man in question. I hope that much spiritual power will find channelship through aspirants associated with the group, but certainly the group does not exist as a means of service to certain of its members only. Its power is due to the fact that, as far as it is concerned, it functions spiritually and its inner activity is manifest equally through the whole of those that respond to the challenge. The expanded personality of an idea should be seen as an idealized objective in which all have a part.

Where human beings are associated in a genuine spiritual affection the achievements of one of the number are as great a delight to the others as to the one who achieves. There cannot be a sense of proprietorship of accomplishment in spiritual fellowship. Men of the outer world of mere facts may set one of their number up as a superman but the spiritual world knows that once a man rises above the level or plane of achievement of his fellows, he is entirely held up in such an exalted position by their ideals as these then dwell in him. I think we fail to realize this in much of our current group efforts.

Since an individual's accomplishments are sustained by the group consciousness of which he is a part, the achievement of one is the achievement of all.

319

THE GROUP BEFORE THE WORLD

If the signatures indicate the solidity of the spiritual support or foundation of the group, what may we expect is to be erected thereon? Here we touch the inherent weakness of occultism in general. Higher spiritual work must serve the race and also aid whoever serves the race, and this means that it is not to serve itself. True occultism is never esoteric in the sense of pretending to possess vast knowledge or powers given only to the elect, and by the same token the real in the field of the occult never builds itself for the sake of an outer establishment. A spiritual organism cannot be anchored in outer or physical reality, but only in personality. Our group is and is under necessity of remaining an association of personalities. We try to build personality in each member, and to encourage each personality whether directly or indirectly to express itself in the service of the age or the race itself. The Sabian Assembly is certainly not to be a monument to some individual. If it should happen that I give service to the race that the race would think worthy of commemoration, such is perpetuation of the service and the ideal it strengthens. The Assembly as other than a tool or agency would be a monument to mere vanity.

The foundation we are putting down is for the use of any personality that wishes to use it, whether of our group or not. Just as we are happy to stand behind any visitor in a profitable great madness, so will we stand behind anyone who has courage to face the whole world and contribute the best of himself. We are concerned with what has been my initial contribution to a philosophy for our effort but we must not forget that it has ever continuing obligation to validate its real worth, exactly as the group must justify itself continually.

The only valid test of the worth of an occult fellowship is how well it instruments its dual concern to serve both the race and those who seek to serve the race.

540

THE NATURE OF SELFHOOD

It is most essential that we appreciate the nature of an entity or individuality in consciousness. Man's divine spark seen as an immortal core of selfhood and consequent on its very nature must be changeless or beyond transient influence by anything other than itself and so altogether incapable of consciousness or knowing on one hand or growth or experience on the other. It is merely the kingbolt whereon all phases of personal experience are bound at source. This may be a rather overliteral way of expressing the idea but it facilitates basic diagramming, and identifies an absolute linkage in an ultimate perfect self-completeness as the actual dynamic in experience we can recognize as Source in a very true sense. Source is God within not in the sort of anthropomorphic dividing up of divinity and boxing up of a quantity of God within self but in the illimitable manifestation of divinity in the core of certainty through which selfhood ultimately is existent or possessed of being. Self has existence in the use it makes of Source but never in any manipulation of Source as something other than itself such as from the nature of Source is an impossibility. Self acts out of Source as it articulates a relation with certainty through endowing any convenient or available factor of experience with a self-relation. It contributes life in a conscious sense through a limitless potential of touch or tie to the immutability to be experienced in Source.

Self is changeless in this very core of being and therefore its ultimate contribution in an endowment of being with awareness or personality is a confirmation of whatever changelessness may be uncovered in relationship. This is loyalty as divine fact in awareness and so is eternality in consciousness and immortality in being.

A man's Source is unique, complete, changeless. To touch the changeless core of others with this changeless core of self is to live with infinite potential.

130

THE PRICE OF AN IDEA

The price of anything can be considered in two ways, the amount that must be given by the one who wants it and the rewards that accrue to one who creates either the thing in question or a demand for it. This applies to ideas as well as to groceries and novelties, but it is in the realms of thought that this principle both works out most strikingly and goes most commonly unrealized. For lack of an idea an individual often will upset his whole life, a bit of psychology humorously expressed in the theory that Satan finds mischief for idle hands to do, and with a wrong or valueless idea he may make even a worse job of his affairs. Achievement of the most humble sort is as contingent finally on a concept of some kind as is the finest contribution to the race. And the tragedy is that man commonly unaware of the real worth of ideas is perfectly content to stumble along on borrowed or outdated notions that like secondhand cars may run after a fashion but are frequently in the repair shop.

Sooner or later the time comes when an issue of life can be met only by some new idea, when the whole tradition of the drifting past of the given individual is inadequate to meet the new demand, and at once there is a potential purchaser for the needed concept. It is in this fashion that a life slavery may be contracted. The young man not able to prod himself or keep his self-respect accepts the stimulation of the moment and meets the issue, but he has developed habits of ill companionship that have caught him permanently. At times such as this a real idea is priceless. Everyone requires some concepts, as a man will build up a financial or an energy reserve. The seeker might better be a creator of ideas to use and sell at a profit.

The most effective concepts to live by are those fashioned by oneself, large enough to embrace all interests, pliant enough to admit expansion.

301

THE FOUNDATION IN ILLUMINATION

The repudiation of things that have no inner meaning may be said to be the heart of religious experience, and the foundation or fellowship in religious experiences is the sense of inner reality that is compensation for such a repudiation. Unfortunately there is never a spiritual symbol that does not have its feeble counterpart and it is a special tragedy that the counterpart of renunciation is far commoner than the genuine article. The tramp or the hobo has renounced all as a mark of disillusionment, unsocial temperament or laziness. Through all life there are sulkers who won't play, and this is sure manifestation of the selfhood that has failed to know any self-expression. It is necessary in a spiritual work to provide for the transition so that everything unworthy is not repudiated as the tramp discards belongings but that the old may serve instead as the way to the new. Whatever a seeker is or has is exalted. He is asked to recognize it as a symbol or indication of this reality he is bringing into manifestation. And as he gains acquaintanceship with the core of his own self he achieves power. Not the symbols themselves as reality but the reality that is behind them must be realized. Then and then only do the outer things have actual symbolization of any worth.

Your own health, wealth and happiness in terms of all it means to you to be healthy, wealthy and happy is the goal of this work and of all Solar Mysteries training. But if these are real only in a comparison with the health or wealth or happiness of others then it is altogether possible that the occult principles will work in reverse to take away what you have, since from him who has not or lacks inner and spiritual resources or illumination shall be taken what he has.

The aspirant respects the inner symbolism of every outer benefit, and in recognizing and respecting his own inner worth gains power.

901

SATURATION IN REALITY

With but rare exception great success in any field comes down ultimately to a matter of saturation in the given reality. When the great medical diagnostician functions smoothly and accurately in a puzzling illness the uncounted thousands of factors converge with high statistical reliability in his judgment of the moment, and thus he can do what a less experienced practitioner can accomplish only with great stress of mind buttressed with checking and verification and perhaps a very full-of-thumbs procedure. The phenomenon is particularly common in musical circles where in exceptional composition and performance it would almost seem that the artist or creative genius has to be born to his special part in life. In the arts in any case there always is an apparently necessary gestation in a womblike milieu sustaining a self-mobilization quite in contrast with more conventional maturation. In the more ordinary circumstances, as in business very strikingly, it is essential that an ambitious person pyramid his experience continually.

A development of immortality can be seen therefore as an equally fundamental self-saturation in all possible elements of immortal act and thought and association, and in consequence the two indispensable sanctions of the Sabian Assembly in its administration of the Solar Mysteries discipline are in its service to each aspirant in making possible his self-saturation in immortal reality and in its effort as a group whereby the various special activities of certain among the many seekers brought together in the fellowship of the total vision or piloted to whole realization are enabled to express themselves in common or in a co-operation of special capacities that provides the added dimension of selfhood or the direct experience of immortal potentials.

Saturation in immortal reality fits one for using his special capacities in co-operation with those of others and provides an added dimension for all.

906

IMMORTALITY NEEDS NO EMBODIMENT

The most important fact about immortality is that it becomes entirely independent of body as such. The eternal awareness is under necessity to function in the limits of embodiment when it has an expression that is knowable in these limits, or that thus is real in a making of a difference as a sole test of reality ultimately, but it is never in a physical bondage to body as mortal man must be. There are actually the immortal realms of existence where no contact with bodies or framing in embodiment is either necessary or conceivable but we are not considering such potentials and are not able to do so intelligently while we are anchored in this world and obliged to function through its limitations and facilities. We look to the spiritual beyond in a hopeful expectation but know well enough that to attempt to test it or rationalize our belief in it would be to lose even the vision we have. The immortality in which we are interested is that enduringness of the here and now that forever transcends ordinary delimitations and endows everyday existence with a veritable paradise of common experience.

We ask an immortality that anchors us in the life rather than in the death of the tangible universe and wish to enjoy an inward vitality that body instruments rather than those outer inevitabilities of bodily upset and decay with which the lower consciousness busies or concerns itself. We wish to use body and not to be used by body, and so it is vital that we never look out on the world when in perspective physical permissions and conditions are prior to everything else. Of what greatest value is body primarily? The answer is to make it possible in an everyday and practical way for identity to refine its will and act without unnecessary self-depreciation as it learns its powers.

A true immortality constantly saturates every thought and act with immortal implications and so transcends bondage to time and space limitations.

917

THE HIGH ADVENTURE OF MATURITY

Immortality as a mere self-continuity in time with nothing of personal capacity for timeless enjoyment of self-existence is a prospect of eternal torture rather than blessing. Needed is some inexhaustible or immortal potential of self-expenditure that perhaps has best dramatization in the notion of an ageless youth to be produced by the long-sought elixir of life of the alchemist. In more literal and practical fashion this is precisely the quality of selfhood to be cultivated on the path of initiation. A shallow fellowship all too frequently is mutual commiseration of people inwardly drained dry of real ability to stimulate or be stimulated above the level of the senses in almost inevitable crystallization if unlinked to some higher function, but spiritual fellowship is of the latent youthfulness of soul that is developed and sustained in its continual outreach to experience in the area of being above the limiting rather than facilitating operation of time and space. The Sabian Assembly therefore is a working group and it encourages every individual outreach in the scope of its vision but by its very nature has little present reward for wholly past efforts.

By a working group we mean that we place all reality and perspective in the present. What is of the past is of value as it is alive in the present or actually is contributing to effort and to real opportunity for effort in a here and now. The longing for the things finished and enjoyed in the past, to the shaming and depreciation of a present, is characteristic of a senility that must escape from its impotence with subtle intellectual dishonesty if not otherwise. Not so much better is to project all potentials into the future and so excuse any nonperformance. There has been and will be but mostly there is.

Memory and anticipation are valuable only as they serve to enrich the present, memory as wisdom, anticipation as clarification toward the ideal.

701

THE PROBLEM OF PRIMING EXPERIENCE

No question arises more frequently in the work than that usually put in the form of how shall we interest new students. It is because the lessons seem hard and their methods strange that each newcomer finds himself at a loss at first and that he really has to be in active touch with the main goals of the work or be participant in some common activity before he feels he has begun any true execution of his pledge as a real Sabian seeker. The lessons provide a special experience of a spiritual and esoteric nature but the trouble is to gain it at the start. The Sabian project exists to prime a higher experience but many students are never in contact with any others and group meetings may develop a lovely warmth and real vitality without helping the newcomer to get behind the outer facade of the reality and thus really become aware of the higher dimension in which he is framing himself.

Life as a whole is a continuous reconstruction of experience and the lessons are a continuous reconstruction of the total experience of the race as this has been caught and generalized in what a nice custom has come to identify as spiritual writings. To these can be and are added the philosophical and literary treasures of human effort to constitute the source materials for the Sabian commentaries or basic mimeographed lessons. In time the students learn that all they study together is a living again in the experience of older culture as a way of self-enlargement into immortality, and the newcomer has to be helped to see how he can start this from the beginning if in but quite a faltering degree at first. The higher truth is not learned but can only be lived, if initially in imagination or ultimately in fact. At the end the individual finds himself living in a racial significance.

A sense of belonging in a group and of participation in affairs of immortal moment comes about when one actively contributes to achievement of the group's goals.

818

SPIRITUALITY IS POSITIVE

The greatest lesson each newcomer on the path must learn is that his progress and development lie entirely in his hands through the whole of the way, and that there is no responsibility outside himself for anything that may happen to him whether it is on the gratifying or unhappy side of the ledger. Spirituality is positive, and the results of his seeking hence must depend on his attitude and manner of acting. Thus his constructive expectation largely guarantees him the good he desires from others just as his own failure to see the best in others is almost an equal guarantee that these others will act in some unfriendly way toward him. What is implicit is not a fundamental ill will or the reverse in others, to which he must adjust, but rather the capacity in himself to determine ultimately what an act or attitude of another will end up being in his own experience or consciousness. It is the principle brought out when spiritual work is defined as a magic mirroring that reflects the state of an aspirant's reality to himself.

All this of course refers to the spiritually significant act or event. Both good and ill will of a superficial sort are found in everyday life, although even there to a surprising extent the individual of deeper inner realization escapes the destructiveness of most human competition and knows a fellowship of universal friendliness and response to his inner attainment. His unfoldment on the path however is not in the pattern of an escapism that would deny an aspirant every healthy experience or so cloister him as to defeat a full acquaintance with the hazards of human kind but rather is the fulfillment of purely individual characteristics in a fashion to make them a contribution to others directly and to self indirectly by what is called from others.

Any acts of others toward self, whether intended for good or ill, can be translated into good by the positive consciousness with which the aspirant invests them.

1161

THE DYNAMIC IS THE FLOW OF SELF

Because the newcomer enters on the path in the mortal or initial momentum of his being, such as by its very nature will have an ending, the greatest preliminary appeal to him is the vision of having a happier prospect for himself in a balancing of the cosmic scales and of necessity he thinks in terms of time cycles and of a fulfillment in a task as the Bible's good and faithful servant. Simple service thus becomes the backbone of occultism and primitive religion. The master has his retinue and the great teacher his following, and these gain in service the sense of reward in a receiving of their superior's sharing or radiation in everyday living of his own personal achievement in the larger dimension as yet closed to any mere hanger-on no matter how unselfishly or idealistically actuated. In this preliminary stage that is of extreme value up to the point where the seeker quickens to ideas of living orientations greater than mere physical functioning, what is shared is one-sided unless a very great sacrifice is demanded from the seeker and accomplished in each instance until a balancing of give and take is established across any line of demarcation between realms supposedly lower or higher in nature. Unfortunately while this give and take is impersonal in its higher aspect, in dimensions the very nature of which is to support an intensive and broad sharing, it remains very personal of necessity in realms of ordinary time and space and so cannot sustain itself in any overpersonal exclusiveness that defeats it.

The sharing of a true occultism must be on levels of the constant equating of talents or services in a common experience and as a result the Solar Mysteries demand that each seeker be established in a functional role that expresses and is not subordinate to any higher.

Initiative must lie with the aspirant as he seeks to express the highest that he finds within himself, but it will return to him in kind.

227

FELLOWSHIP IS A TRUST

The natural and ordinary desire to be needed in life, or to gain a genuine measure of importance among our fellows, is never to be seen as other than the basic factor on which every civilization has been built, and on which every development of human society depends in almost complete measure. This is competition or the struggle for actual survival, and it is not to be belittled whether it takes the form of crushing back the other fellow who would reach for the same goal or of crying or begging support and sustainment from the stronger characters of life. The point is that this has no place in spiritual work. We avoid all possible organization so that there will be no temptation for this natural instinct to start a scramble for position. We avoid all codification of teaching in general so that it will be impossible, to any appreciable extent, for older students to make the younger ones become discouraged. In the graded work we de-emphasize the standings of students so that a distinction between persons is difficult even in what administrative responsibilities are necessarily a result of place in inner discipline, and when a few students are asked to teach others the policy is always to make it very clear that convenience and chance out of prior background are the basis of selection.

A spiritual work is a spiritual democracy. My position is the result of this chance in prior background and training, and not in any way a recognition of any high merit on my part. Fellowship is a trust, and that I have been approved in the carrying out of this and that plan by the Brothers is no proof of my importance. Here is that sort of a belief that I in turn repose in students who are able by the chance of their own prior background to help me in the work.

Implicit in a spiritual democracy is the precept that all persons are of equal worth no matter what their gifts or accomplishments.

228

ASSIGNMENT OF SPIRITUAL TASKS

It is possible that the previous letter has implied that we are given few tasks of real spiritual moment unless the chance of a prior background and training has fitted us for them, and this is such a destructive idea for spiritual work that I must be prompt to show it for what it is and to interpret further the operation of any selection out here in objective life of certain souls for specific tasks. What I sought to make clear in the prior letter was merely the fact that is obvious once it is called to our attention, namely that for a work out in this world of everyday the qualifications must be those established quite literally in this world. This spiritual fellowship is an inner matter and within the invisible realms we stand in perpetual equality, ever brothers and sisters or lovers and comrades who share entirely in what each has to contribute to the consciousness of inward being. No sense of my and mine ever breaks into this perfection of spirit. But in an outer world where all exists in terms of the my and mine it soon becomes evident that the distinctions between persons are the very basis of life itself and that these must be taken into account.

However the distinctions that are given a recognition in any spiritual group do not properly afford any spiritual estimation or judgment of the individual as a spiritual fellow in this great company of the immortals. If we had a door to fix we would ask some man that has had experience with doors or at least with tools to mend it. The teaching of spiritual truths requires teaching experience more than it requires knowledge essentially of the truths, since teaching is by far the greatest of all the arts. In other words for a given job to perform, knowledge of how to do it is more vital than motive in doing it.

Practical skills are valuable to the group, for there are practical tasks to be accomplished. But the inner spiritual gifts can be given by all.

229

SPIRITUAL WORK IS QUANTITATIVE

In view of the points brought out in the two letters immediately preceding, it should become obvious that there are two kinds of self-expression and that these are basic. There is no chance ever to bring them together and no reason that they should be blended since each contributes signally to the other. There is the path of worldly or material things served by spiritual considerations, because only by the latter is any idea of value or worth ever established in the realm of the visible, while conversely only by material recognition of inner or spiritual values can these in turn be said to have any reality to a conscious or evolving individuality. Spiritually we all stand equal, absolute peers in our invisible fellowship and eternal ties, and there cannot be any distinction as a result between people from any point of view other than physical. In our work we distinguish between persons on the basis of their usefulness to the work, but this is not any sort of spiritual recognition as has been stated. Spiritually, there must be only one basis of estimation and that is quantitative. Quality is spiritual by its own nature. Spiritual effort is an expression of an eternal quality and a widow's mite of effort looms up as worthy as the dedication of his whole life by an avatar. The distinction is in how much and not in how good this giving of self may be. Therefore it is necessary to distinguish between what any person does, which is physical, and how much of himself he gives, which is spiritual.

Man is born with unlimited capacity for self-dedication, for this is relative to himself, and therefore a spiritual work always puts the individual under quantitative pressure to get him up to maximum self-expenditure or else return him to the physical order.

Whether one gives to the group of his practical skills or his spiritual riches, the most valuable contribution of all is to give with a whole heart.

712

SPIRITUAL EMPHASIS IS INDIVIDUAL

The contribution made by anyone to anything is based ultimately on what he is first of all in himself. The Sabian pledge by the apt genius of its careful wording is withdrawn from time and space and made irrevocably self-established. This is the only spirituality that can exist. God is what He is because He does not derive from an anterior reality and does not depend on future certainty and is not in any way either limited or defined by spatial consideration. Man when he is taken in the image of God is at once removed from time and space in exactly the same manner. The Sabian pledge identifies an urge and makes it the essence of everything that has gone before under terms in which anything that comes after is of no significance. It has no determined spot for its existence or form for its expression. Thus the Sabian candidate is self-punctuated at the beginning in a reality with which he cannot tamper in any possible fashion and thereupon beginning and ending and extent in any real sense become nonsensical terms.

The first requisite of participation in the Sabian group is that the aspirant shall not attempt to interfere in any way with it in administration or organization or expressed ideas. It must have a natural flow that like life itself offers fullest activity to everyone and thus sustains group effort through which the members come together in mind and in interest. There can be no planning from the top in an enterprise of this sort, and to attempt to get the group interested in anything that has not somehow emerged out of its own organic unity and to make its organization a channel for any self-aggrandizement whether subconscious or deliberate is to undercut everything for which we have stood from the beginning, and for which we must continue to stand.

The concepts held by the group evolve out of the group, modified in each individual instance by what each aspirant is in the central core of his selfhood.

918

PARTICIPANT OR SPECTATOR OCCULTISM

Perhaps the hardest of lessons for the neophyte to learn is that the wonders of the higher way of life are an entirely personal proposition and hence hardly something to be achieved in the bleachers of life by vicarious participation. In an age when most people hurry to their comfortable seat before the television set or in some theater or to a place of advantage to witness a spectacle even if it is calamity rather than well-planned and large-scale entertainment, or rush in more subjective manner to read the headlines or scan the pictures in a tabloid newspaper or lose themselves in varying printed sensationalism whether this is outraging everyday sensibilities for the worse or titillating a specious aspiration for at least a measure of the better by elaborate accounts of alleged miracle, man is more and more brought to an armchair dissociation from reality or to purely wishful thinking as the substance of all self-fulfillment. If he finds the world getting worse he is assured he can do nothing about it, and if better he needs not stir to help. Thus he can settle in comfort and watch.

In sports there is the easy classification between those creating predominantly participant interest as far as people generally are concerned and those that by contrast develop intense spectator interest both overshadowing and eventually shaping the conditions of any participation as thereupon virtually if not actually very professional or competitive by necessity rather than in creative self-release as is the case in the play of children and the free and mutual socialization activities of adults. Interested observance of life as recreation is obviously not evil in itself, but it presents no parallel to spiritual development. A call to spectator occultism can be pure charlatanry.

Satisfaction as a participant in a group results from being an articulating member of that body, cooperating with all other parts.

920

SPECTATOR REALITY HAS ITS PRICE

There certainly is no objection to the contemplation and vicarious enjoyment of action and achievement by others. This is one of the most important of all elements in true social reality since any one individual is wholly unable to develop excellence in all lines and therefore must contribute to his fellows out of potentials of his best capacities even as he accepts contribution from them through their own special excellencies. The designer of athletic equipment may have an expansion of consciousness in witnessing a championship match that has as much a part in perfecting the equipment as the experience in actual use of it in the contest. Vicarious experience can be as creative as any other if there is a positive application or exercise of the skills of selfhood. What is destructive is any lack of vital connection, or the acceptance of a defeat rather than a reassurance while remaining a spectator in reality in the sense of willing dissociation from responsibility that offers itself in some complex of events. When the goal in contemplation is to escape rather than get into things it debases.

Occultism lifts the sights on wonders that may have high dramatization in outstanding lives of deep significance but what makes the spiritual reality different from the physical is the total lack of the personal and often absolute distinctions that elevate certain persons at the expense of others in the time-and-space world. In higher view an individual averages out as essentially all-individuals when it comes to comparative evaluation. Anybody can be much or little as he wishes whether over-all or in the specific case, and to seek escape is to choose the lesser in the vain hope that there may be some ephemeral moreness with a transient superiority needing little self-expenditure.

The aspirant knows life is to be lived and not merely observed and so engages in contemplation in order to clarify experience, not to escape from it.

921

ETERNAL REALITY IS HERE AND NOW

As has been brought out in different fashion in the discussion continuing through these particular letters, the contemplation of spiritual reality as essentially a spectator is acceptable in Solar Mysteries discipline if it is a species of act in parallel play or the exercise of realization that brings the self into immediate participation in some given wonder of transcendental phenomenon by means of the elevation of action or reaction in everyday terms into a symbolization of the greater reality thus paralleled to the point of a thoroughgoing assimilation into it as far as self is concerned. But this cannot be a literalization or any depressing of exalted actuality to a lesser or purely symbolical representation in order to make the superficial fact important, as a worship of the personality of a leader or a canonizing of a teaching and its literature and so on. Basic responsibility and common decency at a lower best alone are token of a higher better.

Eternal reality is here and now. Only as the spectator occultism actually is reciprocal experience can the end result be other than a destructive unseating of the whole being. This is the case very characteristically in the fringe area of the occult with its sensation seekers and infinite variety of deviate personalities, since an escapist temperament whether arising out of frustration and failure to stand up to life with any self-dignity or out of deficiencies of birth and training will find the esoteric lingo and approval for the studied queerness an ideal insulation from the race in its more solid make-up. Orientation is to the trivial, and to a pretense that has no enduringness because of the always increasing repudiation of nearly everything in which normal existence has long been anchored.

No discovery of spiritual reality can result from a hopeful pursuit of a method for avoiding life's difficulties. The higher evolves from a sound base in the lower.

922

ENDS AND MEANS

There are two ways to think of goals in life, and of the two the one ultimately defeats all self-fulfillment but the other will enrich every last aspect of living. It all comes down to the dynamic as against the static view of reality. When a goal is something that exists altogether in and of itself or in a total independence of those creative dreams and expenditures of effort that have their culmination in its achievement it can be only an outer and alien reality demanding a loss rather than a fulfillment of self in the accomplishment. When a goal is something unchanging or absolute in such a sense whatever is expected to be assimilated into it in some fashion more or less of the filling up of a concrete mold or the pouring of an iron casting is actually asked to cancel itself out in the given respect to what becomes a sort of nirvana on a small scale. Importance is never given to the living and active reality but to what is static or pre-existent in final potentials or to what essentially is dead in its receptivity or as far as possible experience can build on it or move toward it.

Every conceivable goal in living is a visualization that presents an end or the remote factor in a potential of gaining through a shaping and ordering of effort. As man moves toward his goals this activity of actual life produces a change in him of necessity and also in its own nature. There is no meaning in a goal except as giving an unaltering embodiment of some potentiality long enough to preserve the potentiality in its reference to that of which it is a potential. If there were not the living relationship with seeker and goal growing in functional linkage the goal would lose reality progressively.

A goal is a living thing and along with the man who strives toward it grows and alters as the effort toward its consummation finds new channels.

925

THE BASIC IBN GABIROL EMPHASIS

As noted in the materials given attention in the letters of the present section the Sabian exposition almost from the beginning and as specially brought to focus in the fundamental Ibn Gabirol analysis has sought continually to orient the student in what remains real immediately or serves as the mean relative to extremes and stresses an effort for a material end rather than a hypothetical goal that becomes reality when it is achieved. A primary axiom of the Ibn Gabirol outlines of self-realization in the Sabian application is that the manner of doing things and never what is done is of ultimate importance. It is the proposition that has high moral expression in a rejection of an excuse of dubious means because of worthy ends. Ends and goals taken as ever self-justifying in an absolute independence of what might contribute to them are made infinitely regressive by the essentially separative character given them, but when they are accepted as guiding or illuminating projections of creative self-act they dramatize potential capacity and transform the face of all reality. Act as author of its own vitality becomes the pure spontaneity of the Ibn Gabirol lessons

.

There is altogether too much inclination by and large to exalt life's goals and misinterpret their constructive value by taking them for moral justification rather than as the practical judgment for present effort. Where a man is going or thinks he is headed throws a light on what he is at core, and any responsible estimation of his potentials or the probability of achievement on his part because of them must be based on his present acts and reactions as these reveal him in the framework of the experience he shares with his fellows and in that give indication of his actual participation in the general reality.

A goal is useful as a blueprint for action, and its value may be tested against what a man is doing now toward the achievement of it and how he does it.

381

CO-OPERATION IS SELF-STABILITY

If true freedom of being offers co-operation with any or every situation or predicament in life, then our capacity for co-operation is the genuine measure of our freedom. Here is the lesson that every aspirant must learn early in the Sabian work, if ours is to be a true fellowship. The call is not to the student to serve the work as primarily a service to the work, but that he may gain stability in the core of his own selfhood and so serve the world by a contribution made of himself to the world. When there are men of liberty living in the world the world moves ahead. Our task is to assist men to develop or know their own cosmic liberty with their certainty of existence. The work itself is planned to present the myriad of facets that will offer every range of co-operation at early stages of discipline, and that as the aspirant grows will narrow the possible co-operation until at some final moment his self-stability will be measured by an absolute cosmic limitation of ordered co-operation. At the beginning there is plenty for all to do. At the end we find ourselves under the necessity that we each see the utter desirability of the definitely final one goal of each other one and co-operate with it as befits nascent initiates.

The work is ever a symbol of the world, but of the world made adequately co-operative to offer us a symbolical freedom to carry us into a world-proof self-stability. The work is unimportant in essential fact, but for each of us while under discipline it is more important than our own being since it provides a source of our reborn or fresh being-in-freedom to be. Therefore a loyalty to the work is our interim indication of the degree of self-stability we actually achieve but this cannot be demanded or sought because it is a spiritual thing.

A true loyalty is the beginning of freedom and a true freedom expresses itself in giving co-operation to every other as he pursues his own goal.

874

LO IT IS WITH YOU ALWAYS

There is no difficulty in kindling the divine fire within the self provided each aspirant on the one hand simply will see the preciousness of the Sabian work in every least aspect of its manner of proceeding and give the proper high tribute to this in accordance with or in respect to his own resources and capacities as the demonstration of his esteem, and on the other will refrain from any attempt to frame it in limitations of his own private world or desires as in asking any sanction for his own private notions or indulgences. Our respect for genuine personality means that there can be no leveling out of members or making some conform to the ways of others since our concern is held firmly to the root task of helping quicken each divine spark and helping direct it to vital ends as it is activated. We are not trying to reform the world but instead to endow it with more significant workers in the occult tradition. As the seeker is refined he is dedicated to whatever universe of interests challenges him the most. The work refuses to regard its own continuance as a goal for its efforts since it is justified in continuing only as it is useful and since this usefulness certainly is a concern over something more than enjoying itself.

Everything in the cosmos is useful to everything else as a matter of basic cosmic order and on a higher plateau of the real the same principle prevails. The plussage demanded by the work is put to the business of fulfillment in the seeker's life and although this may make him valuable to the work his ultimate usefulness is to himself in a very true way. Hence the work demands only token thanks of him but cautions him that the richness he puts into these tokens will set what well may be the determinant caliber of his life and immortal going.

The spark fostered in the individual by the group is the spark with which the individual, responding creatively to the fostering, will fulfill himself.

715

A SOLAR INITIATE IS UNIQUE

The uniqueness of the Sabian work is not excellence such as comes from being better than something like it as an improvement in Theosophy or a greater manifestation of psychic contacts or a dramatic achievement in mental or spiritual healing and by the same token it is not exaggerated difference for the sake of being different and so providing a novel flight from reality for the sensation seekers of an exoteric occultism. Its uniqueness is a psychological soundness. The work is unique because it is the free association of candidates for an initiation that will be Solar because within themselves they are fully determined to achieve a genuine and creative uniqueness in every ultimate expression of themselves. We have a passion for minding our own business, and as a result either of bitter experience or clear insight we feel our business more than anything else is living significantly.

There are many paths of high occult initiation but there is only one for each lone individual and that is the current one. It is possible that another path might be better for him, but only when a different path turns out to be the one he is on in a variant aspect of itself. The variance is valuable if he uses it but he is equally and much more conveniently valuable to himself without changing if he will bring himself to the same point of self-stimulation without the external and alien necessity of a change or outer readjustment. Under the lunar initiation man was brought to his fullest evolution by the drama of continuing change around him, against which he was asked to respond in a discovery of his own powers, but under the Solar initiation every candidate is brought to know the creative dramatizing power of his own consciousness without any need for the continual buffeting by events.

The central spark is creative and unique, one of a kind, flaming into its true expression through the power of the aspirant's own consciousness.

385

LOYALTY IS FLUIDITY

We have a double process in our discipline. First, the absolute bondage of our eternal spark to every interweaving of our environment and heredity, our conditioning and our karma, must be broken through an escape into an ideal realm. This must be organized so the escape is not merely a retreat in subjectivism such as gives us at the close a bondage worse than the first, and to that end we set up a sort of artificial situation and accept a chosen or elective ancestry so as to be able to function consciously apart from our bondage. In this a student is called on to shift his loyalties and to reach to a gratification and establish a fellowship that will make the new loyalties absolute or real and thereupon constitute his escape an achievement more than a transient day-dreaming. But when the new loyalties have gained their reality, and their novelty has worn off, there surges up into the conscious being all the latent loyalty to the old. Indeed, every new loyalty has intensified the whole of these old ones. Therefore a second process of the discipline is a reacceptance of the older loyalties, consciously and gracefully, by a realization that the background of the soul is real because it is convenient in its totality.

The initiate finds suddenly that he is not living a different life but that life has taken on an altered implication. He is still all that he was before but with a plussage. He is loyal within himself, if he is a true initiate, and hence he cannot cease loyal association with every factor of his experience. But the emphasis will be seen to be in the core of his own loyalty, and not in the demand or compulsion of the former conveniences of his life. Loyalty is fluidity or a self-stability that makes possible all touch with all life.

Loyalty to new values provides new circumstances and so facilitates escape from bondage to old circumstances, but in the end enriches the implications of the old.

207

THE PROVING-GROUND OF PERSONALITY

One of the hardest of all things for us as a body to get firmly in mind is that our work is neither a primary consideration nor an end in itself in our efforts together, but that this association is a curiously spiritual totality the efficacy of which is indirect to an absolute degree. If the work itself and its growth or welfare were a goal to which we were committed first of all, we would merely be gaining one more divergent interest in a life that for most of us is marked by a dangerous tendency to be torn in too many directions as it is. If study for study's sake is our major interest we are better off with other associations where there are equipment and endowment and a world recognition impossible for us. If to be personally odd and different is our desire there are groups far more faddish than we are. If some inborn stirring toward the abstruse has drawn us together then we have to remember that the best occult study is solitary, for inward illumination depends on the private or mystical experience of the individual soul and our group work must in consequence be subservient to such.

Actually our work is the creation of an invisible fellow feeling among us, and this is not directly social but rather is a real spiritual structure. In terms of a teaching we have subordinated, we have on earth and are now losing a Mars humanity that has been staying here to be conditioned into a consciousness higher than now in the ability of any of them to visualize. The work seeks no strange planets for experience, but we are setting up realms of consciousness in order that we may provide for our own conditioning in spiritual reality such as is now beyond our conception. We are setting up a proving-ground, a practice field, an experimental laboratory for pure personality.

The structure of the group is fashioned from spiritual substance, providing the environment of spiritual reality in which the aspirant develops his unique selfhood.

208

SHAPING CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE IDEAL

In terms of the preceding letter our work consists of an insistent holding of individual life against the patterns of the ideal but invisible state of being that we describe as the invisible fellowship and in this of course there is a very great risk as to how it is possible to learn that we really are doing this and are not having the best sort of a good time in the realm of imagination. To permit anything unknown to the self to direct the self is obviously foolish even if there is overwhelming witness to the reality and worth of direction of such sort because after all we have nothing other than self for the ground of being and not to permit self to dominate the being is not to permit the basis of being to continue to be and thereupon to lead to a real annihilation of self eventually. However what we do is based at all times on an experience of the self and so individuality or personality becomes primary to any illumination, and self is not deprived of any part of its own expansion. Selfhood remains the basis of reality and reality as we know it therefore becomes practical and provable.

We are a Mars humanity in our immediate state, but under this symbol we do not mean that we are to cancel one existence so that we may gain a greater. Lesser things are merged in greater under the terms of the spiritual law and not abandoned, for spiritual law ceases when human effort stops and any abandonment is a sign of failure. So what we have cannot be dropped, but must be carried with us in our onward progress. The Mars humanity is insensitive to earth humanity as a lower realm is unaware of any higher, but is influenced in all shaping of its ideals rooted in earth and for a similar effect we mobilize our ideals though indirectly. This is fellowship.

Because the spiritual substance is ideal its effects are indirect, yet entirely provable to the aspirant well- grounded in his own selfhood.

221

EQUITABLE INTERCHANGE

The actual nature of all form is subjective, and the detail of form that makes itself objectively manifest is not as much any actual revelation of form as it is a formal elevation of some or other material reality in life and expression. To this manifestation of an underlying form we give the name values, and generally we recognize in everything everywhere some measure of these values. Satisfactions of being are after all in values alone, and every quest of living becomes the quest for value on the various levels of expression. As men grow into states of civilization and culture the endeavor to capture values as such becomes the endeavor to materialize form and to standardize it as is well illustrated in realms of art, and such a tendency that lies behind all advancements of man is not to be underrated although it may tend to lose itself in extremism. Perhaps I might indicate here that the formal elements of yesterday's inspiration are the standardized or socialized aggregation of man's conditioned being today. He has come to know an outer superphysical structure on which he can press forward for the gaining of greater values.

In the new realms he opens up to himself there must continue to exist the subjective form on which he may materialize himself or establish new value, and it is obvious that if this form is given a fixed or standardized aspect before he has been able to capture it for himself he very soon finds himself working with the thing and not with the life represented. Actually an equitable interchange of necessity must exist between any representation of form in life or formal organization of any sort, and the substantiating and interested individuals or those who seek to participate.

Values, or spiritual substance, are subjective and provide the form on which the aspirant manifests the refinement of his material reality.