1. Pisces - Here the beginner upon the way of life starts with a material receptivity which will enable him to respond to all contacts in the cycle of manifestation. He is, at this stage, negative, fluid and endowed with an instinctual consciousness which contains within itself the potentiality of the intuition. But the seed of the intuition is dormant. The mind which is the instrument of reception from the intuition is, at this stage, unawakened.
2. Sagittarius - Here the ordinary man begins to demonstrate a tendency to become more focused and the fluidity and negativity of Pisces become concentrated upon the attainment of that which is desired. The man demonstrates one-pointed selfish instincts and though he may be, for instance, friendly and kind, it is through a desire for popularity. This is a good expression of the individual Sagittarian subject and shows also the tendency of the soul to turn all evil eventually into good. The lessons of life are being learned and experiment is going on.
3. Virgo - In Virgo, the man who was fluid in Pisces and emotionally selfish and full of desire in Sagittarius, begins to focus still more intently and to reason and think. The latent soul is becoming interiorly active; a germination process is proceeding; the hidden man is making his presence felt. The intellect is awakening [119] and instinct - after passing through the emotional stage - is being transmuted into intellect.
4. Gemini - In the undeveloped man or the average man, the experiences undergone on three arms of the Mutable Cross have brought him to the stage where the "dream of life" can be changed into the recognition of the reality, and the Great Illusion can be seen as undesirable and untrue. The sense of duality is, at this stage, instinctual but becoming increasingly real and steadily more complex. The man begins to dream of stability, of ordered changes and of union with that which he senses to be the most real part of himself. The mystical vision emerges into his consciousness and he becomes aware of the higher self through the first faint flickering of the intuition.

The experience upon the Mutable Cross lasts a long time, and carries the man always back again and again into the sphere of influence of Aries which, through the ruling activity of the first ray, both strengthens the will of the man (no matter what his ray) and ends cycle after cycle with the "word of destruction." Again and again, he enters into the sign Pisces and finds his way around the great wheel until the experience of change and of mutability and the establishing of the transmutation process carry his consciousness from the instinctual and intellectual stages to the faint beginnings of the intuitive processes in Gemini. Then comes a great process of polarization and a moment of transference, after which the influence of the Fixed Cross causes reversal and the lessons gained upon the Mutable Cross have to be worked out and the effects demonstrated upon the Fixed Cross. It must not be thought that, in the early [120] stages of unfoldment, experience is gained only through the Mutable Cross. The man lives in and experiences in all the signs, but the influences pouring through the Mutable Cross have a more potent effect upon him than those pouring in the early stages through the Fixed Cross. It is only when the soul is becoming more alive within the form and the man is aware of his duality that the energies of the Fixed Cross supersede in effectiveness those of the Mutable Cross, just as after the third initiation the energies of the Cardinal Cross begin to control the man and are of more insistent incentive than those of the other two crosses.