912

ONLY DIFFERENCE CAN CO-OPERATE

The Platonic principle that diversity of parts is a condition of the unity of the whole is nowhere more important than in the normal health of human society. Only difference can co-operate in an activity that has any general or actual meaning at all, since sameness in adding to or subtracting from itself can make the process a part of knowable experience only by somehow introducing combat or disparity as a necessary factor. Common living will show this in the hatreds that often develop among people who manage to create a sort of mutual bondage in their inextricable similarities and likenesses. Difference is the basis of identity and any leveling off of individuals according to equality understood as an enforced sameness is merely an encouragement of bitterness and unhappiness of every sort. Equality is as meaningless in any sense of an experienced reality as pure nonentity would be since it is pure negation that denies a man every chance to move ahead of his fellows and expand the group norm. Repression becomes a goal.

The social achievement of which collectivism is a vision and at times an extreme is the realization that whatever an individual gains must be a contribution to his fellows in the same measure it can be satisfaction or reward or real opportunity for himself. Thus when he develops a true gift of leadership he must lead. When he piles up great wealth and enjoys the struggle and responsibility of the genuine stewardship he must enlarge his participation in group reality whether by merely paying higher taxes or actually dramatizing the adventure so as to make sharable vicariously what others might not seek to have for themselves in literal equality. Traditionalism of course with lesser concern over inequalities has a provincial conception of co-operation.

One's contribution to the group consists of the accomplishments, the graces, the substantial facets of character that he has succeeded in making his own.

936

SATISFACTION IS SELF-FULFILLMENT

Nothing is more primary in psychology than the fact that no organism ever moves consciously or otherwise except in expanding an amount of energy that promises or furnishes a reward in fulfilling the self or in providing a sensation of successful continuance of selfhood in a desired aspect. People do what they want to do. Often life is too complex to make this obvious, especially in connection with a move toward secondary or substitute desires as well as toward any symbol as representative of reality translated into vicarious satisfactions, but the underlying personal dynamic is the welfare of personality and this in socialized or co-operative form on higher levels simply becomes the phenomenon of shared reality with the self fulfilled as it has assimilated or projected itself into something more than itself. Spiritual living psychologically and functionally is no different from any other manner of living or self-expression except in its social spread or enlarged dimensions of co-operation with fellow life and reality.

The seeker on the path therefore should want what he may be able to substantiate socially and vicariously through the functions of the group since otherwise his participation in the activity becomes pointless. He may visualize the Assembly as a door to the Mysteries, but to do this is meaningless if he thinks in time and space terms instead of recognizing the channelship of a here and now into which constant creative energy is to be poured for furthering the Sabian vision and through which a co-operative and spiritual vitality of his fellows is funneled into his own personal economy of aspiration. An esoteric assembly cannot exist apart from the individual struggles of those who comprise it and it has its power as they have satisfaction through it.

Creative self-projection into the ideals of the spiritual group and a creative and purposeful use of the reciprocal vitality thus made available is spiritual living.

1169

THE IDEAL IN ETERNAL STEADINESS

Each seeker must continually vitalize his long-range objectives as a means for sustaining in a cosmic steadiness the broadening variations of his experiences and his use of his own individual or personal variations in his relationships with his fellows as involving more and more facets of his skills and potentialities. He needs care in avoiding the unwitting crystallizations that spell death but, while these presumably will bring about the end of the physical organism under even the highest sustainment and lengthening of life on this earth through the Solar Mysteries procedures, they have no compulsion on the inner or conscious life or personality as such. Yet it is in the inner or psychological areas of experience that the crystallizations are most commonly effective, simply because they are not suspected and the average individual has no means for preventing them. Men who are too self-centered, whether grossly or with the highest aspirations, are in bondage to the body because in either its indulgence or its denial for presumed gaining of spiritual merit the consciousness is acting for an indomitably discrete or self-seeking egotism. Denial of physical appetites has no meaning except in contrast with others who do not bring them under control, and so is a vicarious enjoyment of such noncontrol and a strengthening of self in isolation from other selves. Here the concentration of effort in the present defeats every desired goal.

The ideal in eternal steadiness embraces rather than excludes other human beings, and so must be established in the potential fellowship with all others as this is never a compulsion on the others to be like self but instead is a projection of selfhood in each possible assimilation by which present differences in contact are exalted.

As the life of the aspirant expands into more varied experience with the consequent necessity for developing larger skills, he is held steady by fidelity to his ideal.

1154

THE WAY TO START IS TO START

When the control of events lies wholly in the self there is a marked tendency for things to fail to move when the self does not act, and it is this lack of grooving in so much of personal initiative that is encouraged and accentuated in a period of world transitions or even in the minor interim periods of human experience. The seeker is asked to develop this state of creative flux in his own affairs in all types of cosmic cycles, and the aspirant comes to face the problems of personal dynamic above almost everything else. Thus there is a characteristic restlessness among people interested in spiritual teaching, and candidates for initiation are continually carried this way or that and change as the wind in everyday living affairs or are unreliable in meeting higher responsibility because they are unable to maintain some definite orientation within themselves. With his freedom from former groovings and compulsions a seeker is lost unless he cultivates a firm channeling of his own aspiration or efforts in a single over-all inner grasp of the world and himself in imaginative and creative vision such as gives point to his endeavors and real fruit from his achievements.

The way to start is to start, and in world flux the most important part of self-realization is in the single-pointed dedication of self that results in every starting becoming a reiteration of every other one because the individual is complementing the world transition by reiterative recoveries of one-pointedness in the self-starting that is ever new in successive situations or relationships but is eternally the same as a creative expansion and ramification of the self as selfhood per se. The dynamic of initiated self-realization is the ceaseless sense of need to be and act self in absolute spontaneity.

Every new start if made in the light of the aspirant's underlying creative spiritual purpose will strengthen his potentiality for absolute spiritual spontaneity.

262

ABSOLUTE INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

Because imagination is the normal manifestation of those higher inner stirrings of man whereby he makes touch with a reality or a phenomenal actuality larger than normal experience, the only test of that which is true and that which is false as made apparent through or to the imagination, is the subsequent degree to which that which is so revealed will be found to square with the eternal pattern of things or with an eventual squaring of facts to each other in the objective universe. Imagination if it dreams true is clairvoyance, but still when subsequently found false is no less an intuition in touch with a truth somewhere and somehow, even if it has proved wrong phenomenally. The task ahead of the seeker is not to attempt to shape his powers of seeing and of clairvoyance and the like, so that he possesses a true gift of a positive seership, but rather his need is to develop the judgment and knowledge of the coin of the race mind by which things become phenomenally true or false. The normal eye of man is not seen as out of normal function when it sees what is not. The fault lies in the concept and the balancing of elements of perception in the brain, and the same difficulty applies to occult faculties but to a greater degree in view of the fact that the concepts of things absolutely or above usual experience are wholly poetic and allegorical and of the stuff of man's realm of imagination rather than of his direct or normal experience.

Truth may be expressed in a poem when it cannot be given to man in prose, and eternal relationships may be expressed in the medium of allegory or symbolism when they elude all exact expression and precise phrases. Any absolutely intellectual honesty in occult study therefore demands a recognition of the true nature of imagination.

All occult concepts encountered in the higher consciousness of imagination must prove themselves as an enhancement of objective experience.

263

WORKING FOR OR AWAY FROM PATTERN

The true nature of imagination is creative, and the true goal of all occultism is the development of imagination or of creative power greater than that which is a normal heritage of man. Too often occultism and higher studies are made ends in themselves. The seeker in all sincerity will state that his only desire or aspiration is ever to draw close to God and to become more and more a part of the reality of eternal things. In the light of this he will seek to withdraw and separate himself from all the normal interests of life. He will turn to ascetic disciplines of food or habits and thoughts and strive to be superman by becoming less and less man, or to achieve a real elevation of self either by first destroying his own foundations or else by trying to develop on the foundations of others. This is imagination but imagination of a lower and rather ingenuous sort. The seeker who can visualize his illumination only objectively, that is by seeing it only in terms of its difference here and now from normal standards and normal being, rather than subjectively, that is as an expansion of an inner capacity to know and be rather than an immediate and literal upset in all life and being has missed the very genius of the occult.

Imagination is at work whether occultism is the craze or the underlying reality of the seeker's life. In the former case however the creative potency is directed toward an accentuation of things as they are and of tendencies in life directed away from universal and cosmic pattern, because the seeker is utilizing a point of view founded in his present situation and rising from faculties conditioned by a course of life he wishes to repudiate. In the other case however the seeker works toward universal pattern by seeking the pattern first.

Creative imagination is subjective, and through its exercise cosmic pattern is discovered, thus permitting objective reality to be fashioned to ideal form.

822

THE SPIRITUAL HOUSE OF CARDS

Once in a while it will happen that the dedicated seeker entering a spiritual work and contributing nothing but constructive or generous co-operation in every detail of his response to his new group orientation will find himself hurt deeply by the impact of what at its best is quite frail human nature, with the result that everything will seem to come tumbling about his ears like a house of cards. Just why should this be possible? Is not the forward effort of each individual aspirant a reality that on its own account puts down the foundation for its accomplishment or its lack of any? Can anything insinuate or force its way into the experience of anyone unless it has significance in his case or is in some fashion in response to his need? Here is a basic Sabian principle. How does it apply to the circumstances here? Is not the principle invalidated by this common cancellation of purely individual convenience in group need or convenience?

The answer to all this is a complex of many answers, and the first and most important realization to be remembered is that each individual's private experience is itself a compound or transient construct coming from a shifting of relationships into a focus of need or convenience and that he is maintained not in one world but in many and that no one of them escapes some measure of distortion in its underlying co-operation with all the others for his benefit. Thus a man may wish to attend a social affair when under necessity to keep touch with a business development and while perhaps not feeling too well, but the adjustment in such simple case with telephonic contacts arranged and a common-sense attention to bodily upset brings no crash of ideals and a superficial unhappiness of situation calls out a better self-ordering.

The various frames of reference in which the aspirant moves sometimes impinge on each other, but confusion can be rectified by a better self-ordering.

957

BACK INTO THE WORLD

What probably is the most dangerous stage for the seeker is when he comes to the point where he is likely to lose his way or to sacrifice everything he has gained in one fashion or another through a smug self-obsession. Here is where the Solar Mysteries are in greatest contrast with the Lunar through their demand that he return to the world of everyday ultimately for the social or only sure demonstration of his conscious immortality. This is mainly a symbolical gesture in the Sabian regimen of self-development since the danger is met practically or as far as any external provision can go and yet avoid the imposition of the Lunar stamp by keeping him in the world all the while. Here of course is a way made possible by the complexity of life today. What he is taught is the intelligent maintaining of a worthy place for himself among his fellows in such a manner that he avoids any betrayal of his nascent Solar stature by straining for invisible support or applause instead of projecting his higher potential uninhibitedly and at the same time escapes any depreciating of his immortal and social self by a like straining for superficial supremacy over those around him.

Thus our major charge to the seeker is to give attention to the continual refinement of the higher or spiritual potentials that of necessity must be quickened in the pattern of his own individuality but our minor charge through which alone the major will be effectuated is to return to the practical world for the validation and realization of each new dimension of achievement within the self. Unless this is done the danger at moments of crisis is that the self may retreat into a never-never land of its own assumptions or idle hopes and there seek comfort in co-operation with the lesser realities of no stimulation.

Spiritual potentials refined by their thrust into the higher are realized, made manifest and so rendered demonstrable in the lower.

959

CERTIFICATION BY THE WORLD

Achievement in the world primarily is a way of sharing a plussage in self with others. Unfortunately, many people who gain an exceptional part of the power and possessions within their milieu will adopt a dog-in-the-manger attitude and be rather ruthless in disregard of the rights of others and their own spiritual obligations but it can be realized that this always is the result of an inward inferiority or an inability to do more than hold momentarily what is clasped in their hands. Achievement is simply the dynamic experiencing of plussage in self and important as it remains a division of labor in which individuals share their potentials of diversity and thus contribute to a real spirituality in their several cases or to their conscious immortality. The seeker is taken back into the world for an affirmation of himself. Were a person on the path to rely on indications of a higher nature as an index to himself of his progress he would run many a chance of true self-deception because there would not be the social rectification.

What happens all too often and tragically is that an aspirant returning to the world whether for an instant or the season may do so with a sense of his own spiritual importance or of a superiority that is more a subconscious realization but in any case plunging right into the heart of things with a faith in his immunity to contamination by everyday delinquencies, and therefore at once assuring himself of a hopeless enmeshing in human frailty. No one can deal condescendingly with anything without quickly enslaving himself to it since it has become necessary for the sustainment of his ego. This is an inadequate form for the return of the seeker to the world. Even God is not better than the world but rather the world is better because of Him.

The world in which the seeker substantiates his realization is his world of everyday and the substantiation consists of a rich sharing of himself.

1033

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS LIVING

Whenever an individual pours himself into something with an idea of long-range service as in making a contribution to posterity or in rescuing and resharing some contribution out of the past with an immediate or tangible reality, or when he gives mightily of himself or his means for people in distant lands, he is engaged primarily in what is real to the extent it offers enhancement of his own here and now in a very literal sense. The great artists of all ages were equipped to make contribution to generations other than their own by the universal quality of their effort. This means that it was superlatively rooted in the immediate milieu in which they labored. Possibly it often was not appreciated in their own day, but the lack of recognition suggests the artists' deep creative agony that barred any general communication as far as their own time was concerned. The lack of success was hard but of itself meaningless. Most things without appreciation in their own time are dead aborning. The fact that someone's fellows pass him by in scorn is so seldom an intimation of his genius that it never can be taken as such a straw safely. People of immortal stature are more often honored in their own day than not. They live on when what they emphasize in some excellence or achievement of the moment is also part and parcel of every moment and among all people. Cosmic significance is precisely no less and no more than full participation in reality on a scale of cosmic dimension of history and of human ramification.

The purpose of life is living and that which ramifies in human involvement out to global proportions in society to live in history or the ultimate evolution of man is an intensity or plussage that calls all others to share in individual being. This alone is great.

Immortal living is an intensity of application to some consuming interest to the point of excellence where it has high meaning for other people as well.

1034

THE REMOVE DEFEATS THE REAL

Greatness in living is plussage in the here and now, and the great souls of any and every age have been those who made enduring contribution through the fullness of their throwing of themselves into the immediate milieu of high seminal self-expression. Thus it can be said that the effort to participate in spiritual significance by going to remote things and showing an interest in the regressive removes and distant realities by which immediate self-responsibility is avoided is self-defeating. The outreach to Masters of Wisdom through meditation and the attempt to achieve self-enlightenment by devotion to causes of which no direct and practical experience is to be had is psychological escapism of the most extreme sort no matter how sincere it might be or how exemplary the life may be otherwise. The great Lodge will always seem to be working through relatively imperfect vehicles because these are the souls who wittingly or unwittingly are anchored within and who are busy pouring themselves into the here and now sometimes so tempestuously that like Madame Blavatsky and other marked deviates of recent occult prominence they have had little patience with petty aesthetics. Shallow self-refinement as pure self-indulgence is of course an evil.

The rewards in life and in all achievement in the higher context of transcendental and immortal reality are paid in currency of living and not in remote satisfaction as a member of the eternal aristocracy. Hence neither the rewards nor the achievements are possible except when the basic or dynamic concern is with living as such. The individual must be self-activated into pouring himself into the issues on every plane and in every dimension of his being in such a way as to demonstrate spiritual actuality as perfected participant livingness.

The immortal is passionately alive to issues on every level of his being and brings his central fire to influence the direction of them all.

445

IS HIGHER EXPERIENCE POSSIBLE?

The term higher experience is not adequate, but there is hardly any other way to approach the necessary understanding of a life lifted out of its limitation and moved to its own transcendence. The so-called higher is a realm of perfect realization, and experience can be no genuine part of it. The experience is the way to its realizing and in consequence every experience of the higher must take place on a lower, which is wholly impossible. Actually the higher is the ideal, and unreal because as expressed it is a projection of something toward it but in no way what it is. Neither words nor any amount of picturing by any means of sense transmission will give an idea of love to an individual who has not experienced it, stirred to its reality and then expanded into its realization. The higher is an ideal and indefinite in all else but the fact that it still lies ahead and still needs real present experience and shows by its terms how the way will reach ahead and beyond. The higher is ever a lower approximation, and so what we mean by higher experience is specially idealized lower experience.

The service of every initiate to eternal values is hence to the approximation in terms of experience. It is the demonstration of the fullness and completeness of livingness in terms of an elevated or transcended life. Thus in addition to the stirring of others by a sharing of fullness in physical living the initiate makes possible the experience of sharing in the divine restlessness or a possession of an unlimited potentiality. There is a true eagerness of service and the tirelessness of companionship in questing if only for the joy of seeking and enriching the passing moments, and there is a new fullness and one obviously free at the start from the weight of place in life.

The initiate shares with his intimates his sense of the as yet unfulfilled potentiality of all life, and his eagerness in pursuit of it.

808

THE CRITERION IN OLD EXPERIENCE

It is the afterview that presents the great dramatic moments of life as spiritual thaumaturgy, and so the seeker cannot count on some great light appearing on his own road to Damascus as a symbolization of his higher potential or a guarantee of his fitness for some exalted task because as he looks for it and expects it and so puts the center of his spiritual integrity outside himself he makes its appearance impossible. Effort restricted now to future achievement is non- spiritual because of the holding back or insincerity in the present or immediate context. To make touch with reality in everyday terms with only a part of self in the desire for spiritual self-focus in abstract dedication to something remote and intangible is the dividing of being and its betrayal by incomplete act on the lower plane and the entirely unactualized scattering of self-potentials on the higher. Both Moses and Paul had the high spiritual experiences because of their completely honest and thorough self-centering in their immediate work at hand. Only as the seeker gives himself fully to the doing well of what he is able to do in the expansion of his immediate experience or a living of everyday life in its most practical challenge does he reach the height of special revelation in these ultradramatic manifestations.

How is the aspirant to march ahead then and have any insight into his own progress? The criterion is in past experience because any spiritual unfoldment under occult initiation is marked along the way by recurrent realization coming into consciousness much as the dawn or refreshed return of daylight reveals where self has gained its darkness-surmounting powers at best. Such realization very often may be commonplace in passing but sometimes very wonderful afterwards.

One finds the pattern for future enlightenment in recollection of the pattern of past enlightenment, often recognized only in retrospect.

456

THE AWE OF WHAT SHOULD BE

Creativeness in its every aspect may be described as awe of what should be or as a divine presence first quickened in man. It may be stated that only through awe of the potential is God really expressed and His will made manifest. Creative genius always knows its newborn and soon proceeds to authenticate the mystic birth by its capture of a beauty of expression in the shape and suggestiveness revealed in the moment filled with reverence. No mother ever looked on her child with any greater degree of wonder at the miracle of it than will the artist regard his handiwork or God realize the intrinsic beauty of His creation and its flowering in His creatures. The divine presence becomes the mind in men through which they find themselves above self-seeking and at the same time wholly self-consummated. It is not that God has presented Himself to men since He can hardly subtract from His own nature but that men suddenly have flowered as God's creatures in a fullness of real or eternal divine fellowship. Man is himself. Man is capitalized!

The utter self-consummation is not arrival at a goal but an awakening to the fact that whatever is real in the self is beyond a conception in self as self is physically or outwardly self-known. It is the miracle of retraction to source in self to find instead of complete loss of outer self a complete expansion of the inner and a whole drawing of the outer into a greater inner as again a paradox in words. The awe of what should be flowers into an awe of what is coming to be, and the soul in a sudden sharing of eternal creation is lifted to that totality of infinite fellowship in which human presence stands divine. And what thus takes place inwardly is reflected in an outer wholeness. The objectively known life suddenly becomes a manifest totality.

When the soul quickens to the presence within and finds expression in some act of special creativeness the aspirant finds consummation.

457

THE MANIFEST TOTALITY

Nothing would be more inconsistent than for seekers of a higher truth to emphasize fullness in their world of everyday and with the same breath to affirm that there is no reality save in an ultimate subjective or spiritual state. Superficial students often do this in a way that shows they neither are aware of the inconsistency nor think through to the real significance of the double emphasis. There is no acceptable fact in the notion that those who inherit higher truths are a select company of special privilege and that the abundance in living demanded by them is the birthright with which they are endowed so that others may recognize them for what they are and so that they may enjoy life in a way befitting their high estate. Neither is there anything acceptable in the idea that abundance is God's will for all and that a delivery of the abundance by God is dependent on a proper lip service. The health, wealth and happiness gained by awakened men and women must be seen as an authentication of their spiritual fullness by the entire world as it pays this willing tribute to an inner fellowship spread by them in their breadth of living. But these forms of abundance cannot be seen as any contribution to a mere enjoyment of objective life.

The abundance of life is enjoyed after all in some ideal or ultimate significance. A person whose life is empty looks with an aching envy on this outer abundance but if he gained it while empty in his inner being it would destroy him. A person who is full within is beyond possibility of self-bestializing. His possession of the gifts and bounties of spirit is a sharing in significance and uplift and the outer thing is inconsequential save to those who cannot by more direct perception know the manifest totality when they see it.

A fullness of spiritual fellowship and of the world's satisfactions go hand in hand, but the latter are important only as indication of the richness of the former.

458

THE SPIRITUAL REALITY

The loss of himself in fantasy by the aspirant is one of the most distressing of all phenomena observed by the spiritual teacher and yet the fundamental emphasis in any genuine higher truth is the primary cause of this for the reason that the transcendent element can be gained initially only by a repudiation of the world of everyday and the practical realm of experience. So firm are the shackles of human bondage that any liberating blow must be sharp and decisive. It will never be possible however to liberate anyone in this manner and at the same time make sure that he remains in his own firm setting. If each young seeker could see that what he achieves is a broadening and lifting of his focus in life and never a change of base he would avoid the major difficulties before him but unfortunately he needs wholly objective encouragement at each fresh stage of progress and unless he has a definite objective chance to show this to himself he is lost. Thus a seeker will be strengthened in the demand he become a vegetarian or by some manner of acting and dressing serve notice on the world about him that he is a changed man. At the start of the pilgrimage this dramatization is relatively harmless but when a seeker supposedly along the path still demands a kindergarten show-off he will find it only in the realms of fantasy and total unreality. Unwilling to hold to his part in human society, he creates a dream state to execute his aspiration.

The spiritual reality is in fellowship with the totality of all without either accepting any bondage to objective limitation or breaking irrevocably with any phase of objective being. Transcendentalism properly is a rising above limitations from within or a mastery of them by ideal sublimation and a creative expansion in livingness.

In order to keep the self well anchored, familiar things are never to be abandoned in exchange for spiritual fellowship, but rather to be enhanced by it.

466

THE TOTALITY OF OUTREACHING

The stability that comes from a wholeness of outreaching or continual looking to broader interests than smug self-enjoyment may be recognized in the individual who possesses it by a receptiveness or an eagerness to match experience with experience or values with values in all his living. His is never the surrender to an alien but always a denial out of a genuine illimitability of resources that anything at all is truly foreign to the universal consciousness. He is stable in his all-possession of reality or an all-realization of totality and he is enabled in consequence to master life in any conceivable situation. He belongs to the invisible fellowship of immortality because he truly lives and knows and shares every immortal consciousness. He has outreach to all things because in spirit he expands within all things.

Our task is the development of immortal consciousness in every phase of living so that our outreaching may approximate an ideal of this sort, and the first step in the task is the practice of reaching out to every person and thing with whom there is the slightest indication of a possible tie in the immortal fellowship. It is not the merit of a spiritual life that it escapes all contact with evil nor is it any sort of spiritual merit to be either tolerant of evil or blinded to its existence and activity. True spiritual outreach is to what may be of good buried in the evil, or to the underlying stability that has lost itself in the evil. The seeker gains real refreshment in an association with those of an enlightenment equal to his own or greater but he grows and makes a definite contribution to the immortal fellowship only as he succeeds in associating with a hidden spirituality and latent or nascent potentialities in his more unpromising contacts.

Spiritual living recognizes the hidden kernel of immortal worth in every associate, moves to meet and expand within it, and so adds to the immortal fellowship.

483

WINDOW-SHOPPING VS GOD-INTEREST

It is the higher significance of actions and never their outer aspect that makes them spiritual or otherwise. Hence their end result and not their immediate pretense ever classifies them as aiding or impeding man's development of personal immortality. It is obvious that the seeker must be true to his God-concept in every possible way, but equally obvious that such a concept must be obtained through whatever means gives him the broadest and so most intelligent contact with both true and false aspects of such a concept. The seeker requires a genuine experience for the sake of his intelligence of choice, and yet he also requires the innocency of faith that endows him with purity or unity of realization. Superficially this is a hopeless paradox, however it may be taken, but actually it is not a difficulty. The unity of God is not discovered in a perfection of exclusion of all ideas but the single happily correct one that would render an aspirant dependent on absolute accident, but in the common denominator of God-realization in every possible or conceivable idea or conception of divinity.

Right and wrong therefore become a matter of attitude or method in the approach to divinity and the contrast has been expressed in the heading of this letter. Window-shopping has its value in making a tentative choice a way to first judgments, and in giving experience an unconditioned freedom of outreach, but to remain forever on an outer side of life's reality is to cease to live. The mart of potentiality must be entered, and the experience with God must be purchased with a giving of self. The window leads the way to the vision, but a preference for the glass to any true committal of self is giving power to diffusion. God-interest is universal as at actual focus in self.

The aspirant chooses his way from among those available to him but having chosen commits himself utterly to living it, for the way cannot be known by observing.

1160

THE IMMORTAL DYNAMIC IS IN SHARING

The first task in calling out the potentials of a seeker is primarily an encouragement to an extra expenditure of self and what resources it can mobilize in the adventure of self-expression that has the greatest possibility of sharing. What seems easiest in so-called esoteric presentation is to stress the concept of self-development and to get the newcomer stirring in occult effort by painting a picture of high rewards for a regimen of faithfulness. In any culture where the individual capacity for imaginative self-discovery is stunted by every immediate pressure of underprivilege it is obvious that there is nothing in the common or everyday mind to which to appeal except an interest in self that is sharpened to its possibly dull over-all end by the very rigors of life or a lack of deeper opportunity for unfoldment and so the appeal can hardly be other than to the frank desire to get away from the more intolerable conditions of being and thus a basic call to renunciation of the world and an outreaching continuance in spiritually constituted higher realms that are real only as different from what after all are the familiar ones in which the human spirit knows itself by necessity. This is poor metaphysics for anyone capable of genuine existence as an individual in any true sense. To emerge into ultimacies of a hypothetical and absolute all is a meaningless statement except as there is experience of allness to make the emergence self-act.

The utilization of this world or of any other whether in a spiritual or material frame of reference is a case of convenience of mind as far as the actuality of reference is concerned since any world is a totality of given experiences, and in Solar initiation any experience is self-fulfilling as self in a sense fills its given world.

The aspirant seeks to share wore and more of himself in wider and wider compass wherever he is and through whatever form he has chosen for his expression.

444

SERVICE TO ETERNAL VALUES

That a fullness of living will be observed in the seeker and that it will give him an actuality of a touch with totality by its sharing of experience is apparent. The life that is not full can get no idea of the fullness directly but can see greater possessions, real luck and warmth of regard and joy in fellowship and know vicariously a reality to be known in experience and built into the ideal to be known down in the innermost depths of self. The radiant life transmits the power of its own being without diminishing itself. It actually moves a host of unstirred to a realization within themselves. Here then is no difficulty. But in what way can the livingness of the initiate be of service to eternal values on the higher planes? The answer should be fully as obvious once the principle is grasped, but in general this is far from obvious. Eternal values like all other values are gained through experience but only while experience in turn is dependent on a fellowship or association that furthers life as opposed to physical or mere inert being. Livingness in its own wholeness or fullness is the reality of the eternal. What is believed to exist forever must somehow be seen as existing in total fullness in some moment of time.

Jesus lived so superlatively in the actual moments of an actual life span that on death he continued to live in terms of higher or eternal values. He is known in truer fullness through lives today that possess the advantages of their perspective in history than would be found in all those contemporaries who knew him in supposedly greater actuality. Livingness has its immediate effect on the totality of every life touched, but such service is really inferior to the contribution made to eternity by experience now of a genuine forever.

The man who lives fully moment by moment not only enriches his associates but contributes to the everlasting store of manifest eternal values.

820

INITIATIVE IS EXISTENCE

What must be remembered is that it is spiritual death to enter consciously on the path of initiation, and then withdraw. This does not mean it is dangerous to change from one group over to another or to make any sort of adjustment that is pleasing to the self when it comes to personal relationships and joint activity, but only that this occult quest is fruitless if ever the continuity is lost and that what is once done cannot be done again in any spiritual sense because it is the original or completely novel impulse that stems directly from self at its core that has integrity. Spiritual death is not punishment as a penalty for surrender of which the soul can be conscious but instead is inability to stir again to real self-dedication. Consequently all genuine initiation builds on the initial impulse, and this requires in a work under the Solar Mysteries that the seeker remain inwardly loyal at least to every phase of his unfoldment along the way.

When a seeker slips into a destructive cycle he has lost his basic spiritual momentum to some extent. His mind thereupon will tend to rationalize every sense of dissociation at core into grievance and any deliberate contribution to asocial side issues and instinctive strengthening of other frustrated seekers in mutual misery and protest in his attempt to instrument the spiritual outreach he has been unable to hold aligned to his chosen group laya center to any challenging degree. Except as his acts and attitudes come to outrage group or community integrity to the point where this must act to police itself, he must be allowed to keep the initiative as the doing by which he is all he is able to be at this point of crisis in his ongoing. It is ultimate fellowship to sustain others the most when at their worst.

There is but one beginning on the way to initiation, and having chosen the aspirant remains faithful to that initial spark and to the momentum he has gained.

821

THE FELLOWSHIP OF DISSATISFACTION

What we also must remember is that actions are not safely judged on the basis of superficial appearance. What might seem an unsocial attitude might really be constructive if viewed from a higher perspective. Destructive efforts to sabotage the group and undermine its leadership might prove to be the genuine catalytic contribution to growth and enlargement. The attention here however is not best given to people among us who are nonconformist in one respect or another but rather to the great majority of us who may have drifted into static or smug content with things as they are in our own private worlds, and so have become incapable of response to any real challenge. We make our contribution to life by constructive criticism or at least a challenge to ourselves within ourselves in the doing of whatever we seek to make the basis of our being at any given moment, and not by inertia no matter how loyal or by continuing faithful as virtual automatons. It is better always to have a fellowship of dissatisfaction than the absence of initiative that is invitation for a very blind revolt to take over. Ideally of course all human initiative is on the truly positive side.

It cannot be emphasized too often that the fruits of the initiatory experience on the Path must have their instrumentation in a doing or an enlarged or positive self-expression of some sort and that any effective participation in spiritual effort must be rooted in some kind of personal employment of energies and resources that not only is under the discipline of everyday living but that provides the doing of a higher nature in which the self is successfully more than itself, or mirrors itself as challenged instead of defeated within itself. Thus in this way the self escapes accepting itself as mirrored in a lack.

The aspirant invests his everyday tasks with spiritual overtones and by thus constantly performing above himself knows a constant spiritual enlargement.

847

IMMORTALITY IS A JEALOUS REALITY

The goal of the seeker under the Solar Mysteries is service to humanity under a reciprocal arrangement whereby he sustains an eternal reality that others by recognizing in him what he has achieved through his self-refinement enable him to share as a steadiness in the total community of these others who are aware of the stimulus. It is a simple case of division of labor with an initiated one forgoing what lesser men find their greatest pleasure in order to enjoy what few can know personally but all yet can share through him. Thus the specialist in any line is sustained by the host of those he serves. They in other ways may be specialists too, as at best they should be, but they seldom are interested in the particular sacrifices contributing to any spiritual unfoldment such as call to the initiate-to-be.

To encourage a spiritual unfoldment the seeker is helped first of all to solve his more personal problems, and there always are those who are drawn to the occult in the hope of escaping from a state of affairs that they cannot handle effectively but who have no genuine conception of their potential privilege in serving humanity by putting down a foundation of immortal steadiness and sharing it. They desire in a self-interest that is primitive or immature rather than heartless to do something about the lack of elbowroom in life, and when they are successful by self-discipline in an ordering of their personal affairs they have no further demand on their immortal capacities and hence are the ones who begin to feel the discipline limiting and who look in unconscious if not deliberate fashion for an excuse to turn to the purely selfish enjoyment of what they have gained. They cherish a status quo that is not to be questioned and so they miss all real challenge.

When he has won his spiritual steadiness the aspirant shares it with all, as they share with him whatever is steady and valuable in themselves.

848

THE ACID TEST OF A SPIRITUAL CALL

The acid test of a spiritual call to a place in the Mysteries or to any real enlistment in the work of the Lodge is the eager enthusiasm of the seeker for continuing in a sharing of the steadiness he has achieved from his early initiation, once he has been successful in a way that has meaning to those not interested in the occult in the essentially complete solution of his more personal problems. While a popularized occultism may sanction escapism in its Utopian visions and activities on supposedly higher planes that merely add up to neglected responsibilities on lower ones, the Solar procedure rejects all effort that does not hold to self-center or to the nucleation that has had an effective demonstration of itself through the results in everyday life and experience. A true spiritual work is a magic mirror that reveals or makes manifest or establishes whatever is put into it. The seeker who turns away from what has served him well, unless by growth into an extended relationship where something else by serving him better is an expansion and fulfillment of his experience, is simply left to finding himself on his own terms as established by his own rationalization.

The Sabian aspirant is shown that he must ever be grateful for whatever has helped him in the past, and that he must buttress the reality of this by occasional assistance to all the early agencies even if it is necessary to do it covertly because of human failings or the unwillingness of any such an agency to accept his good will in its own terms. Otherwise he may be torn within himself. What he builds into himself in good faith remains what he constitutes it, and when he turns on what in the past has stimulated him because no longer able to comprise it in his present fulfillment, he diminishes his own reality.

The aspirant is eternally grateful to all agencies that have helped him on his way, even when these have ceased to be a part of his present reality.

852

MAGIC AS A SABIAN NECESSITY

It is obvious that the proper manifestation of magic and a discipline affording an opportunity for developing the power to work real magic and participate in a thoroughgoing theophany are of greater value by far than the show-off miracle-mongering of the charlatans and well-meaning pretenders, even though these individuals may actually be preserving the tradition after a fashion. It is as ridiculous to shy away from everything magical or to deny a reality that cannot be given some objective measurement of the sort with which physical science has been so enamored, as to refuse to use fire for heat or cooking because it has burned down the house or brought injury to the flesh. No true transcendence of normal living is possible without the conscious turning to measures of control or utilization of the broader relationships that to conventional realization are always magic. In the usual routine of the Sabian work the outer show of magic is subordinated to the fundamental requirement that every member of the group faithfully give the world the most complete co-operation possible with everyday events in such a way that these seem a simple excellence in normal terms, but the highest magic is encouraged within the activities of the group.

The most dependable signature for the student in attesting to the effectiveness of a conscious participation in the invisible fellowship is the very commonplace operation of the unexplainable that somehow adds up to a heightened living and accomplishment. Since the world of today is highly secular at core the magic usually is known in intellectual terms as coincidence or a lucky convergence of factors or unsought invisible co-operations but there is also in every department of the work a living theophany for those sensitive enough to know it.

The participant in a spiritual fellowship finds that all experience begins to be touched with happy coincidence and finally by the magic of divine manifestation.

1066

THE SECRET OF CONSECRATION

Through many thousands of years the illuminated souls of the race have known that spiritual accomplishment of a great or enduring sort is founded on or centered in a consecrated personality. The avatar is the best known example of this because his life of sacrifice and principles provides a continuing ideal for ages after his struggle in his own time to quicken the understanding of his own people. This dramatization of exceptional sort has equivalent parallel of immediate if lesser scope when a social reformer or political leader gives fresh stimulus to humanity's potential through his personal devotion to ends of individual interest or challenge that as so dramatized begin to appeal to others who then join in the pursuit of them however indirectly and share in the self-expansion. Movements effective in history have almost always emerged with very personal leadership, and human loyalty is nearly always shaped by ideals for which single individuals had the original inspiration of vital impact in their own lives. Actually an existence devoid of some necessity to pour self into effective act and a sustaining idealization is truly a drift into nonentity, and all the great souls are merely the ones where the necessity has unusual power.

The secret of consecration comes down to a real throwing of the self with all of its skill and the whole of its energies into a cause or project of some sort. At the least this can be the yearning to bring fulfillment to the senses and to indulge the emotions, and in many individuals of unique personality the near solipsism here becomes a completely self-centered lust for power without the slightest realization that the conscious willingness to traduce others is a perverted attempt to build them into a common reality without truly serving any.

Great movements evolve from the dreams of consecrated individuals who devote all their powers to some cause that benefits all men.

1067

CONSECRATION CANNOT BE SIMULATED

The old adage that greatness is never great to itself is merely a statement of the obvious fact that great centering of efforts and dreams in the struggle for accomplishment is soon defeated by concurrent attempts to stand apart from the self in admiration of what it is doing. The full direction of energy and skill leaves no room ever for intentness of self-analysis or self-judgment or self-applause as a psychological interruption to the basic flow of being. A person with normal intelligence will organize his self-expenditures and so stop to oversee his particular application of his own capacity, but this is an altogether different proposition from the self-analysis that seeks the approval of the galleries. Greatness may come to a man in a scale of values in which his fellows have a perspective on him, but to his view of himself he is a complex of capacities and desires trying to develop whether imperfectly or magnificently his vision of ultimate ends to an effectiveness of fulfillment in which he himself finds culmination and thereupon continues to find himself what he wishes himself to be. At no point can a person of exceptional stature measure his worth against anything other than his own vision or ideal of perfection, and this is nothing to be experienced as a more-or-less but only as a totality.

Consecration is a disinterest in trivialities with total concern over single-centered objectives that are real in themselves as the fulfillment of self. There are people who joy in the exercise of power but the self-fulfillment is utterly false or leaves them victims of jealousy and suspicion that develop geometrically with awareness of the need to exercise power and to subordinate others to the self. In pseudoconsecration man only plunges himself into a very real hell.

The dedicated man, applying his capacities single-mindedly, finds his own consummation in the consummation of his vision.

1068

CONSECRATION, DIMENSION IN LIVING

Life has a tendency toward broadening or narrowing as an individual is able in the initial instance to extend himself out in an effective fashioning of some reality in which increasingly he fulfills himself because he and his fellows more and more flow into each other, or as he is compelled to grasp with greater and greater frenzy for the external symbols of his own reality that in this second instance elude his functioning manipulation because he somehow is unable to pour himself wholly into anything in which he similarly might meet and come to know his fellows in any universal or spiritual sense. Frustration at root is always the inadequate outspilling of self. The senseless and undirected dissipation or wasting of skills and energies only accentuates the lack of fluid outreach from the core of selfhood because what is given forth is compelled from the self by realities exterior to the self and that leave the self in bondage to an environment devoid of an actuality suitable to itself that self has been willing to give it.

Consecration is dimension in living because it indicates that the self is able to center its reality in a whole wherein all men meet themselves in the common oversoul by which each is completed in a spiritual sense. Identity is not lost in this total reality but gets instead the complementation of potentialities that enable it to become itself in greater and greater part. The consecrated person speaks to all his fellows in the language that reveals their own perfection completely to each of them in terms of each special capacity because each is so completely whole-flowing into his creative activity that all the world not only has enlargement but has it in a manner that gives him a complementation for each widening potential in his own being.

The consecrated man meets every other man in the realm of spirit where the milieu is common to both and the exchange is completion for both.

1069

CONSECRATION IS A FOCUS IN SELF

Many beginners in occultism suppose that inspiration descends on them, and that illumination is a gift bestowed from heavenly realms as a reward for goodness. They assume that they are deficient in a sort of purely factual fashion or that their spiritual lack is an end result of a chain of causes somewhere, and that anything to be retrieved by way of an original and better spiritual state must call for a different and greater chain of causal relationships. It thus is no matter of individual responsibility in the simple sense that men do as they wish, however disguised this fact usually proves to be in a given issue, and that a seeker may move as quickly to illumination as toward eventual self-disintegration never seems to occur to anyone until real experience of his own shows him the powers inherent in his own person. Childhood usually conditions man in the wrong manner and establishes a psychology of the womb because of which he expects nurture from a limitation of his own being and knows no recourse but destructive protest such as in pregnancy and early infancy has supplied his physical needs in one form or another. Thus the germ cell attacks the uterine walls and is literally a parasite until birth, and then the rewards of wails and the like are a primarily effective way to get attention in days of helpless babyhood. The average individual holds to much of this.

Of much greater importance however is the other facet of the struggle into self-existence as a conscious organism in its tangible worlds. The parasite is learning self-assertion even more than a dependence, and the infant and child progressively seeks to stand fully on his own feet. Consecration rather than spiritual dependence is illimitable instinct for self-discovery in and through self-direction.

The dedicated man never ceases searching for and claiming new facets of himself, using each one as a new foothold on the upward path.

1070

ADJUSTMENT AND COMPROMISE

The most fundamental of all cosmic laws is that which in our exposition we usually recognize as convenience or convergence, and see all things coming to center in a manifestation of their own nature or fidelity to their own being. Man's character is destiny in actual fact because what he makes himself is the determinant of his potential of convenience to others. Precisely as an individual's special skill secures him attention to the exact extent that is needed or has value, so his less positive traits are the basis of his social acceptance and his economic place among his fellows. His brute energy wins him what minor place there may be for labor to be expended, and his higher self in its dramatization or custodianship of group values and mores is the root element in the tolerance extended him in more integrated manifestation of social interconnections. Every one of us is convenient in a more or less actual immediacy of moment in our fellow participation in the business of living in the commonplace dimensions where no solitary experience or even existence is possible. We may symbolize value and so add stimulation to association with us, or we may be more literally useful in some lesser function, but at the core of every connection of man to man inwardly or outwardly is the mutual and interactive service through which each of the persons concerned fulfills himself.

This means that in every detail of the continuing interaction of social being there is at once a self-service and a contribution to others. When the latter phase of the matter dominates and is increasingly the nature of individual reality, then what properly is a detail of adjustment and mutual adaptation becomes compromise and even individual surrender that at the worst defeats all worth of existence.

Constant adjustment keeps the balance between the serving of others and being served by them. Imbalance is likely to lead to compromise.

1071

ADJUSTMENT IS INTELLIGENCE

Exactly as an individual orders himself in the momentary case of superficial and passing things, as moving in accordance with a traffic light or employing a hand or a glance to aid his progress when entering a doorway or descending a staircase, so the truly intelligent person aligns himself subjectively no less than physically in the face of all the more important situations and junctures of experience. If one sort of skill will best facilitate the accomplishment of an end he will enlist it quite instinctively, and when there are those about who are of more use to him than others in a particular instance he will no less appeal to them and ignore their fellows in similar fashion. The utilization of the opportunities of the passing moment in this way can be seen to be so common a feature of ordinary living that anything deviating from such a course really calls for special explanation. The adjustment to the exigencies of hour-by-hour reality not only is quite the proper thing but is the very acme of intelligence as such. There is nothing other than the employment of self to its best advantage and the resort to the best of available potentials in other-self that will aid man to persist in his own right and fulfill his own destiny. The adjustment of this character is the basis of all true competence and a person who fails to put forth his best for the given moment and to get whatever advantage is offered by circumstances around him is quite deficient in his own interest and at root lacking in basic good sense.

There is no compromise with self in its true capacity if a person remembers that reality is a matter of interaction with external situations by internal potentialities, and that outer potential is no more and no less than inner realization and a utilization of it.

The sensible man utilizes the interweaving of the potentialities of his inner ideals and his outer situation, each for the other.

1072

COMPROMISE IS SELF-SURRENDER

There is a vast difference in shaping self to meet outer exigencies of the situation as an exercise of an intelligent deploying of the skills and capacities of the being on the one hand, and the defensive suppression of the talents and potentials of selfhood whenever the external situation seems unfavorable to the ends and desires of an inner outreach on the other. The person compromising himself to gain an advantage in such a way is merely reducing the dimension of reality as far as he is concerned, and assuring himself that the outside situation will progressively be more and more unfavorable because his usefulness to his milieu is whittled down through his own self-reduction. Compromise may seem to be little different from adjustment unless both are seen to be not identical but the expression of each other when the reality is enhanced in not-self on the one hand and self on the other. Compromise is a deliberate ceding of the initiative, and it takes many forms of which the most destructive is the tendency to wait to see how the other fellow will act and how events will develop without stirring and realizing that action belongs to self primarily however much other or variant reality may participate and that nothing ever exists except through its own immediate and continuing act whether this may be inner and spiritual or outer and physical self-projection.

Compromise fundamentally is delegating the spiritual and enduring responsibility for the ongoing of self to something exterior, as centering the self in an alien and detached reality in which a self no longer has any possibility of meaning or importance to itself or in which ultimately the self-surrender is spiritual suicide. Adjustment is social living and compromise is individual death.

An act that is merely a reaction is compromise, for spiritual existence depends on a continuance of self-intended, self-initiated acts.

1073

CONVERGENCE MAY BE CONTROLLED

The spirit of compromise has its roots in the feeling of an inevitability in events, or of a compulsion that must be recognized in the situation of the moment. Things are taken as beyond change as far as the fundamental interests of self are concerned, and so it will be taken for granted that the best deal possible should be made for an inadequate self in this connection at least on the principle of escaping the present battle in order to live and fight again on another day when perhaps the advantage may swing differently. There is wisdom in nursing the potentials of self, and in fighting what might be called a rear guard action in defeat, but what is at issue for the seeker is an inner integrity that never is willing to depreciate itself for the moment in the expectation of thereby gaining a later advantage. Striving for time, or sacrificing ground in one direction to husband energy for gaining greater ground in another, is adjustment and not a compromise of reality since there are the over-all initiative and determined expression of the self of which the momentary shift is only deployment of the self's resources.

The nature of the world at large is the convergence or a coming to center of all things that in the case of each is actually an aligning or shaping of itself according to the convenience of all else with which it shares the fact of being a part of the same whole, as it by the same token profits from what is its own concomitant convenience or greatest simplicity of self-act. While superficially events often seem destructive to some and of no value to others, this phenomenon is simply observation from a nonpertinent perspective. Basic reality is reflected inwardly and outwardly for every participant in any whole.

Adjustment unlike compromise keeps the initiative within the self, and so relieves one of a sense of helplessness in the face of outer compulsion.

1096

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-SACRIFICE

The mind is plagued with paradoxes when it comes to this matter of self-sacrifice simply because a martyrdom as such is utterly self-defeating unless it is a wholly unwanted by-product of the events bringing an exceptional consummation to personal effort and because an out-and-out surrender of self to something other than itself even with the highest motives cannot be other than a deliberate cancellation and inner or subjective negation of the self, and so an attempt to give of self by making self nothing at all and thus guaranteeing the giving as ineffectual and meaningless. Self-sacrificing people in the language of everyday are usually far-sighted individuals restraining themselves in the one case so that later they can collect greater reward and thus enjoy an unrestraint exceeding anything now offered or possible and in the other case giving uninvited attentions or unwanted services on all sides so as to compel immediate contribution of tangible sort from the victims of their wiles as the buck-up to the ego when at long last the partner in marriage is made completely dependent, the child's temperament is blighted by a subserviency, employees are conditioned into the subconscious if not conscious servility that as in all these instances supports the generosity and shows it at base to be a vicious attack on the basic integrity of other selves for the pure pleasure of self.

There is reality in a proper self-sacrifice that lies at the base of all true spiritual illumination, and it is vital that this be understood. But it is not at any point a proposition that moves a reality from its center in the here and now on the supposition that in such a move it can create the greater reality or strengthen or know it as centered in some there and then. Self-sacrifice is self-use.

Self-sacrifice is never the rejection of present satisfactions in the hope of greater ones deferred, but rather self-use here and now.

1097

SELF-SACRIFICE IS SELF-USE

The act of self cannot be anything but the effort of the self as this is directed either outwardly relative to external factors in the milieu in which the self finds itself or inwardly in adjustment of the self's skills and capacities as a means of manipulating the necessities of its situation. Self-sacrifice as self-negation is merely futility or a confusion of terms, as explained in the preceding analysis of the concept. It can be a self-seeking no matter how much a person may flatter himself that he is taking the greater role and thus making a contribution to something larger than himself by his supposed selflessness. The sacrifice of self properly means the placing of an emphasis of life progressively away from any solipsistic strengthening of the self in isolation or any attempt to build up selfhood in separation from other selves or the outer and inner worlds of things and of such other idea and consciousness as would be utterly false reality to sacrifice. Self can hardly exist independently of what it encounters or realizes distinct from itself. Psychological isolationism is what produces more frustration than anything else, and at root it is little other than the futile attempt to realize self in a private package.

Self-sacrifice is self-use, therefore, or the employment of the characteristics and activities of self to further its ramification out and through the world it shares with other selves on shifting levels of expression and in varying dimensions of interactivity. The person who realizes that his fulfillment is in and through his fellows and in shared values, not because this is unselfish but because he can in this way have more and be more and so share more, is the one who at the end is sacrificing the negatives for positives of self-expression.

Constructive self-use, and thus a true self-sacrifice, is the rich sharing of one's values with his fellows and so providing a continual enlargement for all.

1098

USING THE EBBS AND FLOWS OF SELF

The teaching of self-sacrifice in the Greater Mysteries, in the terms of the self-abnegation cheerfully accomplished or a total giving of self to that in which it knows and executes its consummation or fulfillment, is parodied in self-debasing whether this is the usual dissipation and indulgence of everyday living or that intellectual and essentially hypocritical self-distraction that arises from frustration and as already pointed out seeks compensation in some flight from real self-expression through embracing the illusory remote. Denial of the impulse is choice in self-expression and good to the extent it draws a better instead of a worse into the core of experience, but to make the act of denial a virtue is the enthronement of negation and so an ultimate destructive move that weakens the being of the self. The act of self-abnegation called for in the higher discipline is to be cheerfully accomplished or wholly enjoyed in the accomplishment, and what that means in everyday terms is the greater satisfaction in a ramifying out into more social and shared and eternal experience than is possible in limited dimensions of self-obsession or a centering of emphasis in the discrete and transient rather than illimitable and immortal realities.

The paradox here is that self obviously must be discrete in a very real and literal sense to have any effective selfhood at all or to be able to act in any respect as a self, but yet also must be as thoroughly part and parcel of all-self in order to have an eternal and creative potentiality. Most philosophy meets this dilemma by a stark division of the world or an acceptance of twin realities of spirit and matter whereby self as spirit is incontestably discrete while yet held no less inescapably to the limitations of body or incarnation.

The flow tide of sacrifice occurs when the aspirant, with a lessening of emphasis on solipsistic self, flows out in full expression of himself.

1100

CREATIVE AGONY AT LOW EBB

If self-sacrifice is self-use and deepens the centers of reality in its various dimensions at the core of self throughout every ebb and flow of self because it employs the ebb no less than flow mode of self-activity and experience, the difference between the dramatized moments of immortal achievement in which all humanity shares each gain for the race because of the individual's outspilling and the retracted and complementary moments of separation or dissociation in which selfhood is driven in on itself and forced to its regathering of its capabilities or personal integration is that the former has all the shared buttressing of the social matrix and nature herself even when culminations are not immediate and external recognitions have still to follow the inner realizations of success and of goals reached very surely and that the latter is without the exterior co-operations of any apparently constructive sort. Thus the spiritual leader may feel himself betrayed by all the world or even his closest intimates, as Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, and often the aspirant will find himself carried away by what seems the victory of his lower nature and the spoiling of himself by his passions and petty jealousies and the drive of all mean and low potentials of his ramifying superficial situation.

Here again however is sacrifice as useful or worthy when viewed in over-all perspective. The self has been able to become the epitome of itself and all other selves, and perhaps of the race in the sense of some great transition in the group evolution, and now must be restored to center in turning from the flow in which it poured out all it had been able to draw into the essence of itself and in starting to regather new substance from the common denominator reached at ebb.

The ebb tide of sacrifice occurs when the soul is driven in on itself in separation from others, in the inward look necessary to his regathering.

1099

SACRIFICE AS DEDICATION

The discreteness of the self is the phenomenon of action and not a description of its being. It is material no less than what is materialistically described as spiritual or as metadiscrete, and in the Solar Mysteries the ebbs and flows of self are seen to be alternation in the projection of self into its separables and in its parallel return into the nonseparable universality for its self-regathering and the reconstruction of its experience in a reconstitution of its world. No matter how transcendental the consciousness of an individual, he is subject to the alternating ebb and flow of self-cohesion. Thus every initiate learns to utilize both to his equal advantage. The cycle of commonest creative and ultimately spiritual experience is the throwing of self and its assets of ramification into the transient environment, to the point where a measure of real achievement is possible, and then experiencing the complete flowing out or burning out of self with each different center of self drained and all perspective distorted. Thus the need for regathering is supreme. The self has sacrificed itself, and for its contribution it superficially at least has suffered a loss of all sense of self-completeness or adequacy and may experience great psychological emptiness. The self is at ebb, and for the moment this means it will seem to be dominated from without and will find that the most trivial demands of everyday are more than it can bear.

In all this however there is merely a compensation as is the law of all nature. In the time of flow or culmination the person temporarily and for the social end is enhancing his individual differences or discreteness, and this is his true self-sacrifice because the projection to potential exhaustion is the substance of his dedication.

The aspirant uses both phases of the constantly alternating rhythm of self-projection into the world and the return of self to universal oneness for self-regathering.