Alice Bailey - Autobiography

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Autobiography of Alice A. Bailey - Chapter IV

In the meantime we had been working hard in our T.S. offices; the children were well; we were planning to get married as soon as things straightened out somewhat. Our own income was quite seriously reduced. The salaries at Krotona were ten dollars per week. Walter Evans' money had ceased coming in since the divorce. Foster had nothing at this time. He had relinquished his legal practice at the time of the war though he had intended resuming it. It was an old, family practice and when he was only twenty-eight he was clearing a large sum per year. This he gave up entirely, in order to help me in the work which was gradually shaping up for us to do - one of the many things which he sacrificed when he chose to throw in his lot with mine. The children adored him and do to this day and the relationship between them has always been one of great affection and, on his part, of great sacrifice.

They adopted him from the start. He made the acquaintance of Dorothy, the eldest, when she was about nine years old, as he was walking up Beechwood Drive to visit me. He heard shrieks and screams coming from a tree ahead of him. As he hurried towards the tree, he saw a small girl hanging by her knees from a bough. He looked up at her and just said, "Drop," and she dropped into his arms, and as he has often said symbolically, she has been there ever since. Mildred was frightfully ill when he first saw her. She was running a case of suppressed measles with a temperature of 106 degrees, though at the time we did not know what it was. She is basically a pronounced introvert and could be depended upon to have "suppressed" measles. We were trying to get a specialist and in the meantime my friend, Mrs. Copley Enos, and I spent the day rolling her in cold sheets trying to bring the fever down. Foster walked in and started in to help us. Mildred gave him one look and they have been exceedingly close [161] ever since. His introduction to Ellison was making friends with a fat and very dirty child, making mud-pies in the back yard.

Foster's life and mine was, therefore, running along the line of united public work and we were planning and arranging for the future. The T.S. situation was getting more and more difficult and plans were being made already for the convention of 1920, where the whole situation blew up. Speaking of my interior experience, I had become as disillusioned with the T.S. as I had with orthodox Christianity but the situation was not so acute because great and basic truths had come to have meaning to me and I was not alone because Foster and I were already planning to get married.

I now come to a happening in my life about which I hesitate to speak. It concerns the work which I have done for the past twenty-seven years. This work has received worldwide recognition and has evoked worldwide curiosity. It has also brought me some ridicule and suspicion, but surprisingly little, and I have been quite able to understand it because I started by being very suspicious myself. I ask myself why I attempt to deal with the matter at all and why I simply do not continue my hitherto fixed policy of letting my work and the books speak for themselves and prove their own best defense. I think my reasons are twofold.

I want first of all to point out the closeness of the link which the inner Hierarchy of Masters is establishing with men and I want to make it easier for other people to do the same kind of work, provided it is the same kind of work. There are so many aspects of so-called psychic writings. People are apt not to differentiate between that which is the expression of wishful thinking or the emergence of a very nice, sweet, well-intentioned, Christian, subconscious, or again automatic writing, the tapping of thought [162] currents (which everybody is doing all the time) or straight fraud; or on the other hand, those writings which are a result of a strong subjective telepathic rapport and a response to impression coming from certain high Spiritual Sources. Again and again in the Bible the words come "And the Lord said," whereupon some prophet or seer wrote down what was said. Much of it is beautiful and of spiritual import. Much of it, however, bears the signature of frail humanity expressing their ideas of God, His jealousy, His spirit of revenge and a great deal of bloodthirstiness. We are told that great musicians hear their symphonies and chorales with an inner ear and then transfer it into musical notation. From whence do our greatest poets and artists down the ages get their inspiration? All from some inner source of beauty.

This whole subject has been made difficult because of the many metaphysical and spiritualistic writings which are of so low an order of intelligence and so ordinary and mediocre in their content that educated people laugh at them and cannot be bothered to read them. I want to show, therefore, that there is another kind of impression and inspiration which can result in writings far above the average and which convey teaching needed by coming generations. I say this in all humility for I am only a pen or pencil, a stenographer and a transmitter of teaching from one whom I revere and honor and have been happy to serve.

It was in November 1919 that I made my first contact with The Tibetan. I had sent the children off to school and thought I would snatch a few minutes to myself and went out on to the hill close to the house. I sat down and began thinking and then suddenly I sat startled and attentive. I heard what I thought was a clear note of music which sounded from the sky, through the hill and in me. Then I heard a voice which said, "There are some books [163] which it is desired should be written for the public. You can write them. Will you do so?" Without a moment's notice I said, "Certainly not. I'm not a darned psychic and I don't want to be drawn into anything like that." I was startled to hear myself speaking out loud. The voice went on to say that wise people did not make snap judgments, that I had a peculiar gift for the higher telepathy and that what I was being asked to do embodied no aspect of the lower psychism. I replied that I didn't care, that I wasn't interested in any work of a psychic nature at all. The unseen person who was speaking so clearly and directly to me then said that he would give me time for consideration; that he would not take my answer then and that he would come back in three weeks' time exactly, to find out what I intended to do.

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