Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul - Discipleship in the New Age I - Personal Instructions

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Discipleship in the New Age I - Personal Instructions to Disciples - L.T.S-K.

February 1938

MY BROTHER AND MY FRIEND:

I would recall to you certain remarks which I made in my last instruction. With your usual aptitude to select that which your personality prefers, and which intrigues your sense of sin (I say this with a smile, brother, but the dramatic glamor of the sixth ray person, working in the Piscean Christian age, loves public conviction of wrong doing) and, feeding your sense of drama, enables you to say: "Now I know," when you do not. You emphasized that which was obvious, and ignored the real things with which I sought to reach you. What were the points of real importance in my last communication to you? I will list them briefly:

The illusion of selection and reward to which, I warned you (as a sixth ray person) you were prone.

The opportunity to service.

To relax and lead a normal life.

You will note that none of these sentences came out of the two paragraphs which you felt were so important and which you emphasized in your papers and letters. Such is your present condition of glamor that the essential strikes you not. You see it not. Such is your present glamor, that it is with the greatest difficulty that I can reach you at this time. I am making the effort but, my brother, it looks to me that this will constitute my last effort to assist you, for if this instruction avails you not, there is nothing more that I can do.

An opportunity to serve and make a new start was offered to you. You were asked to help in some work which I initiated in 1919 (when I first contacted A. A. B. and began my work with her). The plans are made and the work is functioning. Yet you received not guidance from those who have sought to help you serve, and who opened the door of opportunity for you.You have endeavored to initiate activities yourself, doing hastily and often inadequately the things you were asked to do. You were determined to find time for the things that your glimmered personality felt were important. You have chosen to select the work that you should do instead of cooperating in the service which you accepted. You have endeavored to [612] form connections, unrelated to the work already undertaken and organized prior to your joining that particular group of workers who extended to you the invitation. You have tried to organize your own activities instead of cooperating in the work already begun and with which you were invited to cooperate - and with which you accepted affiliation. Your activities were paramount in your consciousness (in spite of protestations to the contrary) and the group activities were secondary.

I advised you to live normally and to relax your intensity, but you have lived abnormally and with an occult violence which has been damaging to you. You have functioned in a glamorous world of your own idea of service and of what should be done, but there has been no true cooperation with what is being done - only an interest in what your own over-active third ray tendency has sought to produce has engaged your deepest attention. Superficially you cooperate, basically you do not.

You have been glimmered by your own values and not by the group values. You have been sidetracked by many non-essential issues and you have not collaborated in my work or with those who are already integrated into the work that I am seeking to do. I am referring to myself in this communication to you, as your statements, and I believe your intent, have ever expressed devotion to me, your Tibetan teacher. You have sought to integrate those into this work who do not belong to this particular line of endeavor but who are working in other fields of hierarchical activity - of equal importance to be sure, but not the work to which you pledged yourself in years gone by. You do not keep your line of service clear. You wander into too many other fields of service which are not yours and where you are not wanted. So great has been your glamor that you have even desired to thrust into my group of disciples an aspirant who, in a later life, will shift her consciousness on to the mental plane and gradually become a conscious disciple, but who is not yet working on the level where those who could be, or are, accepted disciples, are working.

I am speaking to you with no evasion whatever. Your true friends are deeply distressed and seek to shield you and to hold you to the straight path of service. They are conscious of failure [613] and blame themselves for lack of right technique. Why should they succeed where I, too, apparently have failed, and when your own soul seems powerless to pierce the glamor into which you cyclically wander?

What are the major glamors into which you so easily penetrate and which blot out, whilst they last, all true perception?

The glamor of planning. You are sensitive to the Plan, but occupied with your own plans and believe that your plans are part of the Plan. List the plans and the schemes along many lines which you have evolved, my brother, and see how many you have succeeded in carrying through. Blame none but yourself if they were founded on astral dreams.
The glamor of your own spiritual ambition. You desire to be a group organizer under the Plan. You long to produce some working scheme yourself, paralleling that already being done but definitely your own, or to organize some group, paralleling those already existing but which will be also definitely yours. But, when asked to fit into the work of a group already existing, you are too busy with your own dreams to do so and somewhat despise the task assigned. But, my brother, in our work there is no great or little task, only obedience to the next duty whatever that may be.
The glamor of spiritual dominance or control over others. Therefore, continuously, you seek to find those to whom you can stand as a spiritual organizer. They are ever those of no great account in the scale of spiritual usefulness and ever aspirants of good intention but you magnify their usefulness and possibilities in order to establish yourself - in your own eyes, if you could but recognize it - as a guide and leader of other disciples on the Way. You did this with two people, both of them good probationary disciples, and one nearing acceptance, but both working on the astral plane where those with whom I seek - at this particular time - to cooperate, are not working, except as souls, serving from the mental plane and from soul levels.

Again and again, my brother, during the past years I have sought to help you. The indication that what I say is true, lies in two basic facts: First, your deep unhappiness at this time and your inability to work with others, quietly and unassumingly [614] and, secondly, that no success along any line has come your way. Face up to that and understand the implications. Face these two facts with clarity and with hopefulness. The true disciple has ever to face facts. Let me give you certain facts and then let me beg of you to ponder on them:

You are nearly sixty. Ahead of you lie a few more years of service, if you will, or a futile running around, if you will.
You have been asked to collaborate in my work. This is not a question of your rendering obedience; in that I am not interested, but because, years ago, you recognized me and offered to help. You recognized some of my co-workers and offered your assistance.
Your "service," so called, has hitherto been the making of plans after your initial service of financing the earlier stage. But, my brother, the giving of money is the least important thing you have to offer. You have been occupied with large schemes, none of which have come to fruition because they were not the thing which you had, as a soul, undertaken to do and, therefore, they lacked the inflow of the group energy which would have guaranteed their success. You have been busy with an attempt to organize a group here and a group there. But the plans are already laid; the groups are already formed; the organization, connected with my work, is already functioning. Then why not, brother of mine, collaborate with what already is?
You have no ability to work in a big way from the worldly angle and are too old to learn. But the success of all large undertakings is based on the little things, the minor tasks, faithfully fulfiled, of the disciple who is free from personal ambition.
It had been my intention to start some of you on definitely constructive work in connection with the dissipation of world glamor. But this activity you have delayed. You have hindered the work in the group up to date and this cannot be permitted much longer. Work along this line can be done successfully only by those who are mastering their personal glamors. You are yet in the depths of glamor and subconsciously know that this is true. All who know and love you, know it [615] and are in deep distress, wondering what they can do to help you and aid in your release.
The door still stands wide open for you. But the opportunity for you to go forward with your group is dependent upon your accepting the above facts and by your beginning, for the first time in your life, to work as a humble server, relinquishing all plans, all big ideas, and for the rest of this life (which is but a moment of time in the long cycle of the soul), doing the little things behind the scenes of which no one will know.

Have I been hard, my brother? I assure you of my steadfast love and of my deep and lasting desire to help you and to serve you.

I shall not attempt further to make clear to you the futility of your present life and activities. I stand ready to weld you into the group to which you pledged yourself as a soul and on soul levels. But to do this, you must reach the point of complete self-surrender and demonstrate your willingness to serve with humility and readiness. I will communicate with you again when you express the wish to have me do so and evidence, at the same time, a real understanding of that which I have sought to impress upon you.

You have a devotion and a persistence which can and must carry you through into the light. It has hitherto been a persistence, based on weakness, and your devotion has been glamorous. Now get down to facts. Let the future demonstrate a persistence which is based on conviction that you are in the Way of Service and that you travel not alone, but that a group of brothers stands ready to work with you when you will work with them. Let your devotion be that of devotion to your group brothers, to the need of humanity and to the Plan and last, and only last, to me.

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