85

MASTERSHIP AND CONSCIOUSNESS

There is no question but that the definition often given the Great White Lodge as a state of consciousness is among the best of several superficial explanations, and were it not for other considerations of very real importance it would be far easier to use it and end the matter except for those few seekers able to reach out and make the invisible tie with the members of the Lodge as individuals. Unfortunately the experience of every occult movement from that first attempt at the conscious direction of individual illumination has demonstrated conclusively that secrecy is itself much more dangerous or destructive to the seeker for illumination than any of the occult practices of the kind, such as tampering with the body, social relationships, human integrity and the like, that obviously are dangerous in the hands of all who have not as yet a background of training in basic common sense.

Attitudes of life are contagious, and the habit of holding vital matters apart from normal human intercourse and conversation whether because of their sacredness or their shame will unavoidably in one way or another infect the whole consciousness. Thus in time if a seeker obsessed with the value of a secrecy does not continue to learn constructive things to store away in the reservoir of treasure he cannot share with others, he will drift insensibly into the doing of many destructive things as necessary satiation of his desire to live separately from his fellows. This is fundamental psychology. To live an inspired life is to be differentiated, but this is not separation in a physical world but rather is a greater inclusion of all men in a truly psychological sense and in a broader physical sharing. Secrecy leads to secretiveness and this often is mere overstress of lower functions.

Mastery is a state of consciousness and leads to differentiation, not in separation from men as a guardian of secrets but with them as their inspiration.

1085

THE JUSTIFICATION OF OCCULTISM

The spiritual and social economy involved in leadership, in view of its extraordinary preciousness and the long periods through which a world must pass because of a lack at root of leaders of proper sort or adequate ability, means that the most important of all service to mankind is the encouragement and preservation of those who can help each given race or age to dramatize its values and so work up a social and spiritual community of common interest and creative co-operations. When the Great White Lodge was launched, little anticipating what this most significant of enterprises of the fifth root race and that one of its activities in which it first had conscious sense of emergence from the fourth or Atlantean race that was plummeting to its destruction in an ultimate and very obvious fashion through the very purging of those who might have made the new evolution an easier process would actually come to be in the course of its nearly seven millenniums of existence, the loss to the race of its best understanding through death without a practical immortality or definite provision for continuance of service and a more lasting dramatization of human values in avatarlike figures with the concomitant opportunity for culturing new and greater leadership from what might be seen as younger souls seemed unnecessarily and criminally wasteful and thus it was decided by the founders to start a deliberate experimentation with the fellowship that would include both the living and dead together but not in a spiritualistic commerce that dealt with astral shells. Thus came a vicarious embodiment for those whose exceptional capacities for group-spiritship would then continue.

This was to be a spiritual leadership that could provide a matrix in which higher lay leadership might be protected.

The Lodge provides the spiritual leadership for the race as those avatars who have left this world continue their influence through present world leaders.

1086

THE CULTIVATION OF LEADERSHIP

The basic proposition of all higher understanding is the principle that nothing is real except as it is shared. If things are what they do ultimately, and such doing is hardly in a vacuum but must instead be in an interaction with the doing of other things or social, this becomes a dynamic relationship that of necessity is participation in a common and mutual reality of the sort that is cosmic in the sense that it expresses the central genius of each thing in rapport with the illimitable centricity of all things and so is spiritual in the single meaning that word can have. Leadership is a sharing in which the led have the chance for a greater sharing than they could have outside the common effort through which the leadership itself is established in an effectiveness of what it is doing in this group dimension and so is no less dependent on the over-all convergence of the mass in itself or an actual and personal interaction of each other with itself as itself in common doing with each other. The effort to achieve by purging false leadership is interaction with the falsity in question and so sure destruction, but a broad willingness to share with enemies no less in an actual fellowship than with friends is constructive and enduring and a spiritual and inevitably vicarious move if no compromise is made.

The Great White Lodge has developed its unswerving ideal as this has become embodied in its full fellows who serve through many lives when incarnation is possible and who work through their brothers or more correctly their sons of the spirit between the key embodiments and thus in passing culture new leadership, and the contribution is to be measured in the general curve of progress through the years since a first large-scale effort known to history in the sixth century B.C.

The leader and the led establish a vital rapport in a common reality that is not only the core of selfhood of the participants but the core of selfhood of all things.

1087

SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP IS LEAVENING

The naive view that the Great White Lodge actually pulls the strings behind the screen of history is too ridiculous for serious attention, even in the disguised form that presents forces of good resisting an otherwise all-pervading evil and barely able to keep events on any kind of an upward curve. The plain fact is that experience is of itself neither good nor evil but rather useful or useless, and that a universe of illimitable constitution provides facets to bring either to manifestation and to do so in a single context in which what may be useful in one respect can be useless in another or vice versa and give each individual a true and creative expression of himself and his personal genius as a member of his various social and spiritual groupings or dimensions of reality. To suggest that all this is spiritually or individually manipulated at one point alone is to forget the nature of duration and extension and to substitute mechanism for organism. The spiritual forces of the world are a phenomenon of sharing created by a stress of wholeness precisely as the so-called evil forces are variant sharings that while destructive in one view are constructive in others and actually more often constructive than otherwise. Thus individual existence as such is destructive because of itself it is nonsharing or tending to atomistic isolation, and yet its destructive acts are often its only possible gropings outward to constructive sharing. Similarly spiritual effort that preempts all initiative to itself is equally destructive and for the same reason. The Lodge does not seek control of history or even of individuals if that indeed were possible.

Its contribution instead is a facilitation of high sharing of ultimate reality by concentration on high dramatizations.

Spiritual forces are those that speak to every man's longing for wholeness, and the Lodge facilitates the sharing through which this wholeness may be found.

1091

SHARING IN A UNIVERSAL POTENTIAL

The superficial fragmentations in society are the reason for whatever dominance there may be of evil at any given time or place in human affairs, and in consequence the principal endeavor of what we know as the Great White Lodge is to set up an over-all gravitation and pattern of high dramatization of the good that will counter the lesser and more destructive dominance. The maintenance of the higher vision whether in one form or another and in single or multiple operation has been the principal activity in which the Lodge has found anchorage and in a transition age such as the present when an encouragement of individuality and the emphasis on the values of personality lead to exceptional fragmentation with each subordination of group being the result is a too great reliance on parts rather than on wholes. Disregard of others gets subtly destructive and therefore the Lodge, without lowering its standards and ideals for developing spiritual personality, has shifted its emphasis to an exaltation of the group or over-all expression of a great whole and an intensified sharing to strengthen it.

The destructive operation of sustaining wholeness has an exaggerated expression in the age of transition through regimentation. A true social stewardship of each for all is twisted into a totalitarian elimination of the individual as any true personality, but in constructive form the parallel development is a society that in no way is permitted to become an instrument of exploitation of the many by a few or a laboratory in which any little handful of individual theorists or political medicine men are allowed to experiment ruthlessly on men and women as in the extreme case in concentration camps but instead is the fellowship of truly quickened individuals in real divisions of labor.

The Lodge seeks to quicken men to choose the wholeness of group participation, which is a step toward bringing them to wholeness with all that is.

89

THE LIMITATIONS OF MASTERSHIP

If a Master of Wisdom is to be seen as a laya center, or root type of racial expression, then obviously it can make little real difference whether he is accepted allegorically or literally. As far as his functioning is concerned, this remains true. Contact with one of the Brothers is always possible by higher faculty in such cases because it is essentially an interpretation of the cosmic function as an individual, since in dream or astral experience of all sorts the inner intelligence will give definite substance to what after all is but the contact with the idea, and if he actually were living and in the flesh there would be no difference in this phase of the cosmic contact since one not a Master or operating through a Master is hardly in a position to evaluate a Master qua Master in terms of actual individuality.

What is gained by accepting the fact of personality, for what remains the laya center of intelligence? A reality of necessary limitation is exactly what creates a Master, a laya center or anything eternal. When a man becomes the president of a great nation he finds that his power is immeasurably increased, and that at the same time he is increasingly limited in his own personal affairs. Wherever he may wish to go he is attended by secret service men and is hampered by the unceasing concern in his least movement by those from whom he received his office as a trust, true in consciousness even of a king and an absolute dictator. His ability to frustrate this outer pressure on his inner or personal individuality is his capacity for service, remaining himself and yet something else in every conscious moment. Limitation accepted while also resisted and controlled is the basis of all higher leadership, and Masters are the most limited of all individuals.

The Master is consciously and constantly both himself and a symbol. His ability to accept and control these limitations constitutes his capacity for service.

90

SPIRITUALISTIC PHASE OF MASTERSHIP

We have always known that in his functioning a Master of Wisdom is an astral entity, or that all contact with him in this laya center capacity is altogether by spiritualistic means, what Koot Hoomi meant in his letter to A. P. Sinnett when he pointed out that an adept is the adept only during the exercise of his adeptship powers, and the perhaps unpleasant consequence of this for many of us is the upsetting fact that such contact with the Brothers is subject to all the dangers and all the chances for impersonation and distortions that distinguish spiritualistic phenomena. Wise indeed is the seeker who concentrates first on the reinforcement of his own being and the stanch development of his own laya centers before attempting to make such higher contact.

This does not cheapen the Great White Lodge, but it certainly does make cheap and indeed quite ridiculous the frantic efforts on the part of overeager students to make the contact with the Masters and gain all sorts of unbalanced experiences before proceeding in that slow development that will let such contact mean something when it can be made under proper circumstances. There is no difficulty in making contact with the Brothers, but to know what to do with this contact if when made it is recognized as cogent is a matter of years of training. Clairvoyance is merely imagination taken seriously and unless anyone's imagination is properly trained, unwittingly in some instances and the fruitage of past lives in other cases of a precocious seership, it can yield a clairvoyance no less fitful and unreliable than the dreams and normal phenomena of a relaxed or uncontrolled consciousness. I never impugn things spiritualistic as such, but I cannot justify higher faculties that like Mohammed's coffin have nothing beneath them.

Contact with the Masters must be prepared for first by becoming strong in one's own being and then by developing one's own laya center.

91

THE PERSONAL NATURE OF MASTERS

In dealing with the Masters, and calling attention to an essential distinction between the higher or functioning and spiritualistic side of a Master's nature and his personality, I have not as yet brought out the essential fact in regard to the lower nature except to point out the necessity for limitation. Here is a teaching that will seem extraordinarily wild to one who has not plunged deeply into these eternal principles. It is that which Paul cried out with such a loud voice, and which none could understand. "I preach Christ crucified." If we realize that a Master is produced by an extreme of limitation we must learn what this extreme may be, and it takes no great imagination to see that the greatest limitation of physical life with no exception whatever is death. As far as the lower nature is concerned, the Master must be dead.

Here is a mystery. When we speak of the Masters in the flesh, what do we imply? Are we asserting that these Masters are but shells in an astral world? Have we become quite spiritualistic? We refer rather to that feigned death by which these Brothers were understood to assume their Great White Lodge function in the teaching of an earlier generation of occultism. We mean that the Masters go through the experience that to a normal man is death, but that each of them is able to live on in the great strength of his group-spiritship. There are those individuals now living who are Masters, and whose living remains in every way normal, but here is the exceptional case in which a higher vehicle like Madame Blavatsky's missing principle has passed on in as true a sense as when a whole body dies. It functions separately as a Master therefore, exactly as do those not at all incarnated.

The Masters as men may die, but the laya center that they have established lives on by virtue of their great group-spiritship.

93

MASTERS AND BROTHERS DISTINGUISHED

By Master we refer ever to the racial focus of a totally impersonal laya center and by Brother we recognize the personality involved in any making manifest of the racial focus in question, but the distinction is seldom stressed and so we create a mystery with no need to be a mystery. The key to the matter lies always in the separation of the spiritual function and the personality of a Brother, as well as the fact that the former goes on whether embodied consciously in outer form or not. The laya centers of intelligence are a fact quite apart from the particular beings who give them functioning actuality, and it is unimportant from the standpoint of eventual result whether this one or that one acts as personal focus. The race regularly gains expression for its genius through those of its souls who automatically typify each phase to the highest degree, but the trouble in the case of an automatic or subconscious expression of the genius is that the race is voiceless as an entity and that like all human development it grows by slow degrees. A Master gives individual powerful utterance to racial genius because he functions in the laya center consciously, and is enabled to direct and quicken it although himself no necessity to it.

From such a standpoint a Brother becomes the personality or living, incarnate entity, and such is the accurate way of reference to these veteran souls. But to exalt them as personalities is wholly destructive because any exaltation belongs to the laya center, and not to the man. Adjudged as personalities per se Brothers or Masters are human, but their human side is precisely that which while establishing their role in the race is yet that from which such functioning is separated if they are Masters in any true sense.

The laya center function of a Master, which is the impersonal focus of some phase of racial progress, is quite separate from his role as an incarnate personality.

94

THE IDEALIZATION OF GROUP SOULS

The venerable proverb of unknown authorship that invites attention to the fact that passing familiarity breeds contempt, brings out a point of high importance in any teaching of the real nature of a Master of Wisdom. The reference now is not to the laya center of intelligence but to the human and conscious personality, and the attempt in this letter will be to make clear the necessity for a separation of master and chela to a degree that with rare exceptions will allow none of the candidates in any of the many groups in the world of those that acknowledge the Great White Lodge to learn anything about a given Master except as this functioning laya center. Fundamentally of course, the proposition is that the seeker if inspired is not striving for any totally personal touch with his superior but instead is endeavoring in his own more limited sphere to become a lesser laya center and thus to develop gradually into a peership with the greater ones. This an aspirant does not always seem able to understand and in consequence many well-meaning seekers are forever seeking to establish intimacies of an abortive social relationship with every spiritual teacher or other individual who might seem to have anything to do with the Brothers. An intimacy of a personal nature to be constructive must have a community of personal interests, likes and dislikes and tastes shared regularly, while spiritual teaching might become almost a professional matter.

Superficially the necessity for a separation between the master and chela lies in the fact of a familiarity that makes impossible the proper idealization of a Master. Known too well, and seen by eyes accustomed to view the petty affairs of the chela's life, he soon ceases to be a Master in such sight and merely mirrors the viewer.

Because the Master is known to the student only in his function as a laya center he can be idealized and the relationship kept completely impersonal.

95

ARE MASTERS EVER MET UNAWARE?

In continuing our informal consideration of the Brothers as personal individuals apart from the laya center that in every event represents each Brother as a functioning Master of Wisdom, there arise the questions, what is a Brother like and how does he act if anyone is with him in the flesh and so on through the range of typical queries. A direct answer is easy because it must be obvious that these Brothers as individual personalities are hardly cast in a single mold, hence no less difference is found among them than among the average or ordinary group of evolving souls anywhere. A Master need not be tall although one is a veritable giant, nor need he be small even if another must be described as almost diminutive. He is here merely a human being.

What the student really wants to learn when he asks some questions of this sort is whether or not it is possible to meet an exalted being on the street, such as a Master of Wisdom, and not know it at the time. In other words, is it possible really to fail to recognize some great spiritual opportunity, and so to miss out on what will later turn out to have been the chance of an incarnation? It is certainly possible to fail to rise to the full measure of a spiritual opportunity, but it is impossible not to respond in some way. No seeker can miss all chance to rise to the full measure later. The reference now of course is to the laya center of any Brother as focusing an invisible agency. There may not be outer recognition since a meeting of this sort is a spiritual event with no factual necessities and need not actually be a meeting at all, or more than an inner response to an altogether subconscious knowing. An outer or tangible meeting in the fulfillment of this is another matter, to be discussed further.

While recognition as such might not take place if one were to encounter a Master in the flesh, some emanation of blessing would be felt to call out a response.

96

PASSING CONTACT WITH GREAT ONES

Outwardly and superficially the meeting with a Master in the flesh might be described as a wholly disappointing experience, for the reason that there is so great an intensification of the element of everyday that any inner significance is buried in the commonplace, and it is extraordinarily difficult to sustain the situation in much other than trivialities. If I leave momentarily the greater moments when I have known this close touch with one or another of the Brothers as the incidental detail of something of deeper import, my experience in this life with the physical and tangible personalities constituting a White Lodge has been slight. I am not old enough to have known H.P.B., and of her associates only one is to be considered a Brother, and he is in truth the very youngest of the exalted company. Studying what we can of these two yields significant details of human qualities that differ little from other individuals, for even the eccentricities are such as would give no occult clue to the untrained observation. But far from depending on recorded and second-hand details, my mind always turns to the two Masters I have known intimately in the flesh and under circumstances where it was not necessary to have contact at all with the inner functioning laya center or true Master consciousness.

Koot Hoomi well stated the salient fact here in his letter to A.P. Sinnett when he said an adept is an adept only while he is exercising his adeptship powers. Both of the individuals whom I have known principally in their lower selves were fully conscious that they were operatives of the Lodge but both understood, too thoroughly to be taken off guard, that their reality as Masters was the inner thing not to be approached except reverently and through spiritual means alone.

Masters in the flesh are men in the ordinary lineaments of other men, and are approached in their mastership only through spiritual means.

97

JESUITRY AND REAL CHELASHIP

The familiar proverb that the end justifies the means is the basis of what is often called Jesuitry because it first appears in Busenbaum's "Medulla Theologiae" and because he was a Jesuit and it is a principle of conduct that is without question utterly destructive to any potentiality of physical or spiritual service to the ideals of the Great White Lodge. Fundamentally it is faithlessness of minor degree in the face of some greater objective. Here is where spiritual lines are differentiated sharply from material ones. In the manifest world of everyday a distinction of component parts in the eternal being must be permitted freely in order that there may be growth and evolution in each, and that the whole may advance in the spirituality of manifestation. But in higher realms the actualizing law is one of absolute or uncompromising unity and even here on earth and in ordinary relations, whenever the Lodge is concerned, the same spiritual law must operate.

Implicit obedience is achieved by every chela or seeker, and this means no less than an absolute inner attunement between chela and Master. In other words there can be no suppressed qualms and inner trepidation. Chelaship of genuine sort can be founded only on an unimpeachable confidence. This however is not Jesuitry. If a chela plays a deliberate part, or for the sake of the goal makes the slightest adjustment or compromise within his inner or real being, he merely moves to destroy himself. Chelaship therefore is never a matter of a decision, but rather it is a gradual growth into a higher relationship that exists as naturally as the air and life itself. The chela is of value to the Master when their instinctive reactions at every point of mutual concern are identical in a rapport not gained in a single life.

The relationship of seeker to Master is not one of decision but a gradual growth of the seeker into the higher relationship in which rapport is complete.

98

VOICELESS SPIRITUALITY

In continuing our informal consideration of the Brothers and the various phases of the operation of the White Lodge, a point in connection with these Masters of Wisdom is a problem of fallibility or the possibilities of final failure in their work. Generally speaking and from a larger point of view there can be no interruption to divine process and no vital interference with cosmic evolution. But to take the realization of the underlying orderliness of a universal scheme to such a literal extreme as to imagine that nothing a man or Master will do is of any real consequence is to make a mechanism out of it all, or a toy created by God for His idle amusement or else a nightmare of the chance operation of chemical atoms. If a Master and men individually or in groups may influence the manifestation of life and being, by the same token a Master may fail to do so. If the Master is not an inevitable product of eternal processes as a cog in a machine, then in his successes he is not a mere incident but rather an event of evolution.

Spirituality will continue to manifest itself throughout the universe even if man never lifts his finger to help and if Masters of Wisdom cease forever to be. But in such a case evolution must always wait on the complete leavening of the masses at every step taken. Then there is no actuating center but only the cosmic gravitation, and the universe becomes like a business with a head who lacks all ways to train or acquire competent subordinates. The Brothers and others who for untold ages have consciously taken on themselves that specific ensouling of this or that phase of evolution have made possible a speeding of the whole, and thus giving the articulate voice to spirituality and facilitating a success or failure of its definite conscious being.

The Masters consciously undertake the ensouling of some phase of cosmic evolution, thus becoming an actuating center to accelerate the process.

99

THE ASTRAL FILTER OF FUNCTION

There is hardly ever a seeker who has not at one time or another given utterance to the wish that he might sit at table with an initiate or Master of Wisdom, and gain instruction of an immortal sort in an easy and tangible fashion far removed from the usual hocus pocus of the occult field. In this however he is but betraying his lack of fundamental understanding of the real nature of spiritual knowledge or indicating that he is probably likewise at this early stage of his aspiration at least more interested in the fact of possessing some items of this higher knowledge than in the knowledge itself and his possible use of it and so more concerned therefore in avoiding the effort he is called on to put forth in the acquisition of wisdom than in finding to what extent he may increasingly develop channels through which to funnel more and more effort in gaining spiritual understanding.

Knowledge transmitted through purely physical mediumship as in the case of direct instruction or by means of books and the like is always defective from a spiritual point of view, because it remains limited by the outer nature of the facts transmitting it. Hence, and to the distress of those who see the use of higher faculties only from observation of fortune-telling or other futile attempts to embrace the higher realms in physical limitation, it is necessary that a spiritual instruction pass through the filter of astral or a higher functioning. This is a first law of Mysteries instruction. It is the veiling that seems so cruel an accompaniment of the eternal principles. Nevertheless the very intangibility of these higher things forces the aspirant to get them through inner faculties that however wholly nascent should not only be awakened early in his progress but must if he goes on.

Spiritual principles are veiled, intangible, and can be perceived only when inner faculties are developed with which to perceive them.

100

THE MATURING OF YOUNGER MASTERS

The deification of the Masters, that is a ridiculous exaltation of their persons as though by an uplifting of the personality of an important or inspiring individual we were thereupon rising above personality, is one of the greatest stumbling blocks that a seeker may place in front of himself. While it is perfectly true that as far as the veterans among the Masters are concerned there is personal superiority that the average man might never hope to reach in one life or in several lives, yet such an excellence is merely usual fruitage of long sustained and rounded-out effort. In the smaller realm making up the sum of his own lesser efforts almost any man may rather easily achieve a similar mellowness of individual being, and it is for the gaining of this result that the study of higher matters should be undertaken.

The lack of a perfect rounding-out of the personality is not however to be taken as ground for discouragement since there are a number of Masters who have reached a firm and fixed place in the Lodge but who yet admit to a falling far short of this ideal as I have tried to express it in these letters. One of the oldest of the Brothers in terms of continuous present service to humanity tells me that not less than forty-three hundred years of such continuous service is necessary before a Master can take rank in the council of five, or become one of the three elders of the Lodge as it is at present governed. A Master must grow to the point of encompassing all human activities within his inner reality, so that potentially he is a part of each and every laya center and so that he can function successively in each, but truly the first step in any growth to this point is the rising to supreme realization in some one activity even if this seems most inept initially.

The Masters are able to junction as a laya center for any number of human activities. The aspirant begins by achieving a heightened realization in one.

101

THE POSSIBLE MASTERLESS LODGE

In the book "Letters That Have Helped Me" by Jasper Niemand it is remarked of the White Assembly that "this Lodge is never to be taken up on the pincers of criticism and analyzed or fixed. It is at once everywhere and nowhere." Within its boundaries are contained all real Masters, students, guides and gurus of whatever race or creed or no creed. Of it has been said: 'Beyond the Hall of Learning rests the Lodge. It is the whole body of Sages in all the world.' Indeed, it is obvious to this writer that the Great White Lodge certainly cannot really be said to be dependent on special individuals or groups of individuals. Membership in its exalted company is purely organic, or a consequence of simple but divinely steady achievement. Sageship or the attainment to wisdom is all that is required in order to belong to its body and so to participate in its service to God and humanity.

To be prepared for association with the Lodge, or fitted to approach one of the portals to the Eternal Mysteries, is a fact for which no heralding is necessary. Eyes that are brightened to the opportunities in every region, ears that are attuned to the spiritual or inner harmonies of being, hands that are ever willing to perform lowly and unrecognized but necessary tasks of everyday, tongue that is ready always to express the steadying and helpful thought to others point to a state of being so pervasive that it will send its light brightly and more brightly to the eternal heavens. Were all the Masters or faithful Elders of our present race to be taken away for service on any remote plane tomorrow the Lodge would still remain in the hearts of mankind and there would be those to guard its vision and fill however imperfectly the laya centers of eternal love.

Membership in the Lodge is dependent solely on the attainment of wisdom, and wisdom is gained by living daily a life of generosity and love.

181

THE PARADOX OF FREEDOM

Exactly how will it be possible for the man who elects a conformity to the higher or lasting rather than the lower or ephemeral values of life to live free of dogma and conjecture of no relevance as brought out in Sabian teachings? Is not this subject of such greater or lasting value likely to be accepted as sheer dogma or conjecture or basic paradox or contradiction in any concept of freedom? The answer is that the paradox of freedom is the proof of its reality. There is the literal freedom that is so jealous of its rights that it is wholly in bondage to itself or called on to put itself into opposition to the constant series of events that deny its supremacy or actuality of free action, and there is that inward freedom that is capable of separation from every outward necessity however it may accept bondage to any particular series of events quite willingly. The point is that the outer freedom is a demand for the cancellation of all other freedoms, and the inner freedom is a willingness to contribute to all other freedoms equally assiduously. Cancellation creates a bondage to the objective world, and contribution similarly makes any such bondage impossible.

It is not that the man who adopts this practical fellowship of the Lodge is actually less free in objective fact but that the willingness to contribute to all freedoms other than his own gives him a choice of the freedoms to which he may contribute because he is sympathetic to them all, instead of requiring opposition to them all, and this constitutes an inner freedom. Spirituality is like play in that it is a doing of things without any compulsion in their doing. There is in real freedom a genuine element of release or fellowship of joy.

A willingness to contribute to all freedoms other than one's own is true freedom, and permits the aspirant to contribute to a freedom of his own choosing.

389

THE INFECTIOUS FELLOWSHIP

The greatest adventure in life and the certain insurance against teeth on edge with sour grapes is the infectious fellowship of the Sabian and like companies wherein no actuality of touch with other personality is sanctioned except by mutual stimulus to the higher or a genuinely co-operative self-unfoldment. It is true that in stages of the discipline we all fall short of this, but as long as we never justify ourselves in failing to touch the divinity among us and as we always return to the zest of personal touch with renewed appreciation of the potentials each may see in the other, no real damage is done and a valuable experience has been gained. Our own special talents may and should vary greatly and our years in terms of soul-development may not exactly coincide but in infectiousness of fellowship we are all akin.

We watch our own progress by observation of the external factors of life and note their power to infect us with their inner and latent potentials. As we grow in the service of the Lodge, under our real obligation to the Brothers who have seen the early potentialities of our own personal desires and in one form and another furthered them for the use of the Lodge, we become missionaries for the higher occult realities whether directly responding to a Brother or not and our duty as such is above all else to see the ultimate potential in human lives at every stage. We thrill in viewing another's instant of flair that reveals a divine self-expression-to-be. We substantiate this, set up an infectious recognition of potentiality, culture the fainting heart, articulate new-born signs of talent and love each feeble out-giving of pure selfhood. And we work with the Lodge in this by refraining from all demands of and for self and all joy in mere procession-trailing.

The infectious touch to higher experience in the Assembly carries over to all life where one seeks for and encourages all signs of divine potentiality in others.

394

SPONTANEOUS IMMORTALITY

One of the most unfortunate of all words employed in the teachings of the occult is plan, for the reason that it is seldom made clear that this is plan in the sense of an orderliness or wholeness in the constructive ultimate toward which we strive. The common presentation of the divine plan is of some scheme imposed from above, and in this point of view it is obvious that every genuine individuality must be submerged in the indefiniteness ahead of it. Particularly vicious is the fact that there is always some interested body or person claiming to know or represent such a plan, and demanding a surrender of all judgment and experience to its dictates as these are said to originate somehow in a divine will. But divinity is free and is matched in man by freedom or an individual divinity. No work of the Lodge can begin by this preliminary subtraction of freedom from the individual.

As scouts we are commissioned to encourage a spontaneity wholly founded in self-act and impulse, and as a consequence we do not attempt to live anyone's life for him or to execute any plans that are of superior wisdom and revelation. The mobilization of the Lodge has concern in the enlistment of what not only is freely given but is completely self-conceived and self-initiated. The mosaic of immortality has pattern, but the pattern is of the gravitation of values and hardly of preconceived notions supposedly in the divine mind or in a human mind that has allocated some of the divine functions to itself. That toward which we work is highly precious because it is so freely and so wholly given by everybody participating. Nothing ulterior enters in, on the part of either God or man. Spontaneity glorifies immortality, and the Lodge in culturing the immortals must encourage human freedom.

The only cosmic plan is one of freedom for the individual to be spontaneous in the conception and outworking of his own immortal role.

396

THE IMMORTAL COMPANY

Whatever is immortal must reveal something of its own in one way or another. This should be entirely obvious by now. Therefore we should be able to discriminate in the matter of efforts for an awakening to spiritual things and pass by whatever demands the surrender of anything or everything of our own in order to take on something neither our own nor ever permitted to become our own. This principle always remains primary in higher understanding. There surely is such a phenomenon as the example in which seekers of greater development in particular areas of service will encourage those who are less advanced on the way but always in the case of an example the result is not that surrender of individuality by which one becomes the carbon copy of the ideal but rather the enhancement of true personality in response to an irresistible urge toward a fellowship of the higher or broader order.

The immortal company is that invisible fellowship wherein each seeker is wholly sustained in what he bears of his own. Here is a gathering in which personality is drawn out to its full, and with no obligation of self to any other self either literally or in idea of merit and value. Progress toward immortality increasingly is a self-discovery of facets of self and reality in fellowship, as well as that complementing by self of the equally independent facets of other-self. Personality co-operates with personality in the mosaic of eternal self or cosmic order. Down on the level of everyday the working of an immortality is in meeting all fellow men on the basis of co-operation as equals in eternal potentiality. We see in each other the fullness of potentialities that illustrate the ideals held within ourselves. The attempt to enslave others in our own ideals is to destroy the ideals.

Participation in the reality of the fellowship facilitates a movement toward immortality through discovery of previously unrevealed facets of self.

723

THE THREE IDENTIFIED MASTERS

Because Koot Hoomi and Morya were well-known by name the letters K and M obviously should refer to them, and so they do. Here the question is not only the special genius of the race that has individualized expression through these two personalities but also what is added into this genius by the mishap of Theosophical popularization or by the racial consciousness for which they came to stand not only from an inner or esoteric point of view but also from direct experiences of several generations of seekers. Morya is specially the genius of all occult groups in general, and Koot Hoomi similarly is an inspirational core for all modern occult teachers. Thus no matter what the significance of K or M may be in any individual Sabian aspirant's case there also and always is an additional link with the historical factors, and this is suggested by retaining the letters K and M for these two.

Of the many other Masters mentioned in Theosophical work and literature even from the beginning there are two more who have had special appeal to most students. Hilarion in some respects was first among the sort of private sponsors claimed by occult teachers, and was brought to prominence through Mabel Collins. Afterwards he was taken as the presiding genius in the work of the Temple of the People and in that became the type of this specially funneled channelship, and it is as an indication of the basic function of such sort that H is retained as in Theosophical teachings. The rise of the cult of Rakoczy was an expansion of the tendency somewhat later in time and confused in every way by comparison, and so to the inconvenience of a letter as far down in the alphabet as R was the lack of clear manifestation of the genius it would represent. In this connection G is not Saint-Germain.

The Masters have in common a genius for fellowship, and singly they give individualized expression to some thread in the skein of race development.

724

A CHECK ON PERSONAL SENSITIVENESS

The greatest danger in all occultism is that the student will surrender his control of his own consciousness, or will obey dictation from the invisible without any check from his own common sense. The principal effort of the Sabian discipline is to equip the students with a means for truly competent judgment on invisible leadings, and a basic or utterly certain way to do this is by employing the rectification from the race experience itself. We do this by insisting always that we try to learn lessons from history. The meditation letters on receipts or slips each month are a provision for a particular emphasis on a segment of racial experience or spiritual realization during this period as based on an intensified focus of sincere discipline that the act of ritual must involve necessarily. The assignment of these letters is made in such a way that either the Master in question can have genuine contact and provide this as a signature of it or the basic law of pure chance can operate and the inner subjective drift of the being be indicated quite accurately. Whether consciously or subconsciously you have each month a vital key to a moment of focus in outreach.

What are you supposed to do? Nothing, in any direct or superficial way. Whatever is done to be of value must be out of your own initiative and imagination, and therefore the suggestions are kept as indefinite as they possibly can be and remain sensible. But there are valuable uses to be made of the letters. They should be put down in all Sabian correspondence and detail whenever you sign your name or initials, so that your fellow-students may have a chance to catch what there may be of the immortal plussage in your functioning and thus realize your Solar potentials and see their own complemented.

The aspirant is to be subject to no compulsion from without, but uses occult devices to give direction to his meditation and his imagination.

725

THE MECHANISM OF HIGHER SIGNATURES

Everyone is familiar with the form of signature involved in the stimulation coincidence. This is when at some particular time you decide you will look into the possibility of moving to that better house you have dreamed about, and the mail brings notice of the sudden increase in income that makes it feasible and nature herself thereupon seems to give you a green light for going ahead. Unintelligently understood the proposition becomes gross superstition, but intelligently employed it is the acumen successful people develop on all sides. It is expected that the aspirant gradually will come to know how to watch for the higher and less obvious signatures that actually can guide him in every step of his progress. It is a well-tested way for achieving a genuine spiritual momentum and is the foundation of much healing.

Everything in the Sabian work is given an imprimatur for the purpose of furthering the growth of this sensitiveness. Thus the character of Morya as a living manifestation of a definite capacity in racial experience is typified by the Message of Ezekiel and the formal Statement of Sabian Expectations, and Koot Hoomi similarly is revealed in the Message of the Hierarch or Isaiah recension. The Morya influence is seen very significantly in the Matthew lessons that launched a program of Bible analysis in 1926, and that of Koot Hoomi in materials bringing the more recent philosophical thought to its point of illuminating the ferment of the arcane tradition as in Tools of Intelligence based on the contribution of John Dewey and the Modern Thought series. The intensity of the Hilarion influence has special self-revelation in the Prayer of Parting Adoration, and a vital contribution of the challenge of the Bodhisattva in the Discourse on Achievement.

The aspirant can learn to watch for the fortuitous convergences whether of thought or of events that give guidance on his spiritual way.

390

SCOUTING FOR THE LODGE

If it is our primary task to become scouts for the Lodge of our invisible superiors and to see the ultimate potentiality of the essentially divine human estate, what are we to take the meaning of it to be in commonest everyday terms? The invisibility of the Lodge can be accepted as expression of the conscious immortality of its members, but hardly as a description of its member personalities. The Brother who is incarnate is not distinguished as a personality from any man in life and the one who is discarnate will be no different in essence and personality from the man who is deceased but who has achieved immortal consciousness. The definite mark of a Brother as such is in his service to the race through the spiritual ideals of the Lodge, and it may be remarked that the invisible fellowship toward which we reach is not in any way involved with personalities even though we are dependent on this fellowship for the elevation and immortality of personality if we have committed ourselves to the Lodge. Personality is a tool, not an end in itself. It is not to be deprecated or exalted. Service must be seen as the use of personality, never a raising of issues over it.

Capacity for service is the qualification for membership in the Lodge, hence potentiality of self-giving in service must be the basis for any enlistment within Lodge sponsorship. The scouting that is asked of us is the uncovering of this capacity. On the level of a full Lodge activity the service is cosmically evident, and there is an invisible fellowship of effort that can never be mistaken. But on an inferior level there is no invisible quickening of potentiality and no way for the attention of the Lodge to be caught by a candidate. Thus a more material enlistment first must win the new seeker.

The primary qualification for membership in the Lodge is a capacity for service to the race through the spiritual ideals of the Lodge.

392

FELLOWSHIP IN ACCEPTED VALUES

As scouts for the Lodge we are called on to touch men at their own high points of understanding, and become fellows of whatever ideals may stir them to the highest, and this calls for an increasingly warm social sense and gift of sheer friendliness. Much fellowship of a material sort but designed to be spiritual in nature descends into sheer depravity and viciousness for the reason that there cannot be any straining in the genuine fellowship and that the material striving for spiritual effect is pure strain and unstable and responsive to all alien influences as supposedly threatening to this entirely artificial forcing of self upward. Moreover such a crowding of self leads more often than not to repercussions in the so-called lower nature with the surrender to the impulses of an often unsuspected sex reaction and the enmeshing of self in cheap suspicions, jealousies and the like. What is of immortality develops an eternal loving-kindness and as scouts we cannot have part directly or indirectly in critical differentiations.

This is not a call to any overlooking of human faults or weaknesses, but to a realization that if the weakness or deficiency of another becomes an issue to us in our own life the ultimate fault lies with us for the evidence that our consciousness made possible this intrusion of the alien with a downward rather than an upward compulsion. If we have advanced at all on this Path we know that we have created a karma we must hasten to clear. We must transmute the evil we are encouraging by repudiating the false fellowship and delivering each soul to the genius of its own on-going unless somehow we can yet lift it to its higher and substitute an immortal for an ephemeral tie in our common consciousness. A scout avoids karma, unless it is karma-upward.

The aspirant seeks to touch all others at their highest and this is possible only if he establishes a spirit of kindness, which cannot be simulated.

475

MASTERSHIP A STATE IN FUNCTIONING

Because of the remoteness in true mastership it is never wholly correct to state that the Masters are incarnate men, but a much greater divergence from truth is represented by the contrary statement that they are not personalities at all but are only anthropomorphic or convenient idealizations. We evade the practical difficulties in the matter by allowing our students to take the Masters either as personal beings or laya centers according to individual temperament and experience. Actually they are both, but with some necessary modifications. Mastership literally is a state of functioning, and at base there must be a definitely superior human life. On a lesser level it may easily be observed that any great individual is an unconscious participant in many activities of society. Others will idealize him and to a degree live their own lives in and through his being. This is a laya center element in mastership, and it is out of this sort of inspirational and self-projective touch with Masters or chelaship under them that nearly every authoritative revelation will come, in all cases indeed possibly with the exception of instances in which some spiritual leader decides it convenient to use the form of such direct statement as easier for a nondiscriminating public to take. There is the human life, but it is separated and made remote to permit the laya-center functioning.

As the man each Master merely sustains and develops that element of the super in his ordinary personality by means of which the condition of mastership is made possible. As a man he necessarily is just that, and the aim of almost all bona fide inner work in occultism is to fit a student for a balanced and sensible fellowship with men of this super order and so to assist in a real mastership sustainment.

The discipline of spiritual work is fashioned to encourage the aspirant to be a superior human being and at the same time to function as a symbol to inspire others.

476

COMPLETENESS IN FELLOWSHIP

Students will sometimes ask the difference between great heroes and Masters since on the lower or ordinary side of the function of inspiration the aspiring consciousness might as well project itself against the one as the other and in its reflection back gain wholly an exalted illumination. The answer to this is that any ultimate interaction between lower and higher planes requires an equal degree of the desired perfection on both. The focus of human life into which great spiritual inspiration may project itself to ramify thereupon through a host of men is like a lens and needs polishing no less than that focus of mastership through which human aspiration projects itself and ramifies in a higher perfection by which it is self-rectified. The state of mastership requires not only the heroic life but also the conscious continuance of its own roots or self-sustainment in the fellowship and group existence of a true higher dimension. The Master does not need to bring down the higher experience by which he is what he is. Actually he couldn't do it because such is not real here. But live it he must if he is to continue to be and serve as the eternal laya center.

Those who reach up into a fellowship with the Masters in any sense of that word are in the wholeness of that single fact remote from their normal functioning in the society where they exist as human individuals. To the degree they approximate a mastership the fact of the masterlike functioning is vital and apparent in those laya centers to which they contribute. This however is something they could hardly pass down or tell about among their fellow men. In their lives of everyday they are increasingly super but through and by standards that are wholly centered in everyday living.

The Master functions on two planes, spiritually in his laya center, and in society entirely according to the standards of what is superior in the everyday world.

477

THE ROAD THAT IS NOT ROYAL

The question whether it then is not possible for any man to achieve real mastership is one to be answered in an emphatic manner and with an unquestioned affirmative. But it must be seen that whatever achievement is gained in this direction is not a result of a projection of self to divinity in a heightened aspiration, but instead is wholly a matter of a developed self-stability. Aspiration is ever an intensity of touch with laya center, and never a functioning as a lens for the aspiration of others. The modesty of a greatness is the real detachment by which the great man is intent on what he does and not on pleasurable self-contemplation. Aspirants wrought up on the question of their own spiritual status are for the moment cancelling all development and growth. Spirituality is cold in the fashion that it is in no way self-questioning. It is warm in the sense that it is ever infinitely responsive to the possibility of fellowship with it in actual achievement and definite continuance of unswerving higher being.

Any man may become a Master by manifesting steadfastly a singleness of mind and a broadness of interest that will certify in an outer and practical world to the nascent potentialities of laya center in the inner self. Occultism exists to aid the uncertain soul in its achievement of these qualities, and totally apart from whatever may be the intellectual or rationalizing explanation of disciplines and proof of authority and validity such as the marks of separation by which the effort may achieve distinction and real being, the actual end in every effort and procedure is the culture of the immortal stability here put down in terms of a singleness of mind and broadness of interest as the underlying theme for this discussion.

Not self-examination but self-stability is the goal of occultism, certified in the world through a broad interest in the affairs of mankind.

613

THE MASTER'S LIFE STORY

If the many current life stories of Masters are examined very carefully the one common denominator of all will be found to be a peculiar or intensified sort of loyalty. In one way this will always take form as a steadiness of faith in and contribution to an idea that from the greater point of view may be said to be that which the Master as a Master actually is, and consequently it is not the personal manifestation of the Master as the individual among other individuals that is the element we wish to identify just now. Rather the loyalty will take a personal or everyday form in an amazing fidelity to the ties as these at least figuratively stretch over life after life and thus link the Master as the person to another person or other persons. This is one explanation for the fact that racial progress tends to be centered in both time and space so that certain centuries such as the sixth before Christ are epochal as certain places such as Babylon are seminal.

The assumption is not that all racial progress is at the hands of the Masters, since at best they can be said to have a hand in but a very small and exceedingly limited sphere of events, but it will be perfectly obvious that if mastership consists of a capacity for being epochal and seminal in racial progress then Masters must almost of necessity tend to be born and function at times of racial crisis or at times and places of concentration in racial development. They have a close fellowship with the climactic in general if they are Masters and hence they have this close fellowship with the climactic in particular personality as with those of their own number together with those making the conscious effort to be one with them. Therefore there is the everyday perfectly normal and human group expression of mastership.

There is a tie of loyalty among the Masters, centered in a commonly held idea, and this loyalty expands to include all who consciously seek to labor among them.

614

PLUSSAGE IN PERSONAL LOYALTY

The loyalty of the Master for his companions as these in the unfoldment of the conventional life stories are reincarnated again and again to work with him is the major point and indeed only point at which it is possible to understand mastership by the usual criteria of everyday normal living or form any true estimate of it. It is essential however in such a connection that the student remember that while the personal loyalty may be noted and recognized its existence will be no demonstration whatsoever of the truth of the life story or proof of reincarnation or validation of the root conception of mastership as it is presented in ordinary occultism. This loyalty to be noted has one value and this value only. It is as if there were in personality the infinitude of experience that to usual minds of normally living people or to words of experience generally employed could only be by persisting over a succession of ordinary lives and through greater than ordinary variety of test in the gamut of human relations. In other words there are other possible explanations as there are for all occult phenomena and our basic justification for our particular ideas is that in our experience they give us the greatest control over life and bear an excellent fruit in the greatest and broadest richness of living.

The Master and his associates have plussage in personality that is marked in loyalty to its own genius whether in self or any others who possess it, and the heightened spiritual understanding creates a community of effort that in its largest aspect we identify as a Great White Lodge or an eternal association of Masters and that in our everyday activity we see as a changeless understanding by which higher touch is real. The Master is unfailingly himself in everything.

Loyalty among the Masters often results in simultaneous incarnations, and this community of effort makes possible a forward leap in race progress.

624

MASTERSHIP AS RESPONSIBILITY

The social responsibility of a Master or initiate is not as simple as it seems to be when stated in words since after all nothing more can be said in basic definition than to explain that it comes to simple and steady and vital loving and dramatizing of some ideal of the race. It is the eternal obligation of the spiritually marked individual to continue through any and all circumstances to be that sort of personality that symbolizes particularly transcendent worthiness to a group or mass of people. This is apical because it is something no ordinary person can be merely of and by himself. It must be his in a way significant enough so that he can recognize it and rejoice and get strength in it as he finds it embodied in some ideal figure or hero as an assimilation of a lesser self to a great in social experience or as a gradual lifting of that lower self in consequence until the value is available in a racial experience for the direct living of lesser souls and the apical individuality is freed for further similar service.

The Master lives something that others can ever count on and the absolute unflickering steadiness of this particular light given forth by the social sensitiveness of apical being is that which indicates the achievement of any degree of genuine initiation. Here is something beyond a normal biological constitution. Hence from a perspective of the race an apical individuality is required to give drama or value before men as in the greatest instance an avatar is necessary to lift all men and thus from a perspective of the individual a racial or more than single-life compass of understanding is required. Hence conscious immortality as an ultimate mastery of incarnation is what is achieved by the individual who becomes more than a biological person.

Conscious immortality requires one to live daily in love and to dramatize some race ideal, and to hold to these under all circumstances.

625

STEADINESS AND NOT ABNORMALITY

When the inspired Jesus said that he had come to fulfill the law rather than change it he gave a very real expression to a most important principle and one of constant pertinence. If the Master is to continue of highest inspiration to the greatest number of people he must live so as to outrage as few of their moral conceptions as can be done in the light of the moral adjustment for which he lives. It can be seen by the least of thinkers that alienation is not the easiest or most effective way to winning people, and if Jesus had not matched the skills of those about him in carpentry and familial loyalty or willing adherence to dietary custom and sanitary regulation as well as acceptance of styles in clothes and speech and mannerisms and facility in an acid sharpness of repartee and so on it would have been impossible for him as indeed it nearly proved impossible for him to express or articulate the tremendous racial upliftment he has given us.

In the Sabian work we have sought to give this principle a sort of convenient modern suggestiveness or superficially handy form by explaining to seekers facetiously that every dog is entitled to one bite and every individual in a social order his own peculiarity. The quest for occult initiation as viewed from outside is queer to all who find visible life and its risks more than sufficient to keep them busy and give them passing fulfillment, but such a quest for the higher and more wonderful things is as interesting and engaging and eventually as infectious or seminal as any other form of adventuring unless it means a more or less complete loss of normal touch or exchange with humanity at large through an outraging of simple sensibilities in unsocial ways of eating and drinking and talking and acting and the like.

The aspirant, striving to give inspiration to others, keeps touch with these others by observing the ordinary rules of everyday.

1107

OUR DUTY TO THE INDIVIDUAL

In order to avoid the type of psychology that inevitably finds its slanting in an ultimate lust for power and an acceptance unconsciously if not otherwise of the police-state mind, we hold firm to the principle enunciated by Jesus, and paraphrase it to make it affirm that the Lodge and the Masters came into existence for the welfare and spiritual unfoldment of mankind and as corollary that individuals must never be asked in any way to subordinate themselves or sacrifice their convenience for the goals of the Lodge or the plans put down by higher spiritual intelligence. There is no difference between a dictator or egomaniac in power who insists that the welfare of the all consists in others conforming to his notion of the matter without respect for what ideas or conceptions of total welfare they may have individually and a supposedly great spiritual being who betrays his true nature by a same insistence on a unity imposed on the many for a good of which they are in no respects the author and thus a good that ultimately is evil in a diminishing rather than enhancing of the individual. Far better that a work be wrecked, or that the great Lodge itself disintegrate for its reconstitution in greater fidelity to its own essential nature and opportunity than that a single seeker be moved a hairsbreadth or less of any possible measurement from his own way of going.

The consequences of this are sometimes anarchy, and many times it might seem that the self-will of the nonunderstanding is forever blocking the progress of the worthy, but actually the freedom and turmoil of adjustment among striving souls no matter how blind many of them may be in many ways is the greatest possible contribution to real grasp of the temper of self or to understanding of its deeper motives.

The aspirant is never asked by the Lodge to change his ways. The Lodge exists to enhance individuality, not to beggar it.

608

CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY

If we ask of just what precisely a conscious immortality is conscious the answer is relatively simple. Ordinary consciousness or simple awareness is conscious of an immediate object but the object is reflexively a manifestation of the self or a symbolization of basic subjective elements and at ultimate all ordinary consciousness becomes self-consciousness or the eternal as that is experience or an on-going or continuance of identity. The higher consciousness or awareness is necessarily not this but something else or most precisely it is entire loss of self from consciousness without diminution of consciousness in any way or is basic group-spiritship. Moments of this exaltation are known by nearly all people who are in any way sensitive to the plights and predicaments of their fellows and to the need of every social unit in any transient or permanent dimension. Group consciousness of this sort is the temporary assimilation of self to the larger reality and a real factor in quickening men to general social responsibility.

A normal group consciousness of this sort however is the product of individual experience or a projection of a carefully delimited self or a response to definitely self-accepted ideals. There is no transcendence of self except in immediate sense-of-self. The conscious immortality of the initiate differs from this and is not a loss of self-touch, since he is strikingly himself in every group situation because of his intense at-one-ness with all normal stirrings abroad in any group activity, but is an utter lack of self-separation from whatever the group may comprise either by self-transcendence or overemphasis of self and is rather a merging of self with all selves at hand in a greater selfhood or incarnate idea that lives from group to group.

To experience group consciousness is to lose all sense of self-separateness in a joining with others in the service of some immediate necessity.

609

THE MEANING OF SELVES IN SELF

While the loss of self in the focal realization of group act at a moment of crisis or larger group fellowship of some sort is a parallel to the initiate consciousness and conscious immortality there is the striking difference in the latter to which attention was called in the prior letter. Thus there is no loss of root sense of self and no lessening of a normal self-consciousness in the latter case. What is here involved is the merging of selves in self that seems so wholly mysterious when viewed from the outside and merely talked about. The phenomenon is the expansion of consciousness that is initiation per se and the idea is that this merging is a common or normal thing and that it is not a momentary product of a crisis or special opportunity. In every waking hour of his day the initiate is expressing the personalities of others no less than the real self that he is and in the sudden emergency or great crisis he makes possible a larger expression of the group genius because he is practiced in being this real group self.

The basic realization is that no initiate's expansion of consciousness can take place without the merging in himself of the inner being of many others. All consciousness is social in the fact of the exchange of symbolism or interaction of relations with meaning and significance but the given other in all instances of such relationship may function without any actual conscious co-operation. All act must operate in common frames of reference or schemes of embracing ordering but on particular social levels each individual is intent on his being in and of itself. The expansion of consciousness on the level of initiation however is definite co-operation in consciousness and any individual touched by a Master is conscious in his reaction to that.

When the initiate participates in a higher group consciousness the inner being of others is merged within himself and he becomes the group self.