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 - B.S.W.

January 1938

MY BROTHER:

I wonder if you will be able to grasp my intention or if I shall be able to reach you. With disciples in my group, I work not on the astral plane. I work on mental levels, seeking to aid you all in the building of the bridging link between your personalities and your soul, between each of you as co-disciples, and between the Ashram and the Brotherhood to which I belong and which your soul, on its own level, consciously seeks to serve. But - you have been away from home for some time now.

You are not particularly intuitive, my brother, nor has your contact with the "inner brotherhoods" anything to do with the intuition or with inspirtion. There are no brotherhoods on the plane of the intuition. The brotherhoods are group forms and are in the nature of being the personality aspects of the egoic groups. The expression or term, Hierarchy, is only a word applied to the transfigured personality aspect of all these egoic groups of liberated egos or souls which function on the higher levels of the mental plane, and from there seek to aid the sons of men. Your contact with the Hierarchy is, therefore, on mental levels. Your contact with what you call "inner brotherhoods" is astral, with all that this word implies. There is not necessarily anything wrong or undesirable in this contact, provided that you recognize the plane whereon you function, with its obvious limitations. [634]

Have you ever noticed that I am training you to come out of your tower of isolation, and yet at the same time I am training C. D. P. to stay up on the summit of her tower? But yours has been a tower of isolated personality, and she has had to learn (and is still learning) to create a tower of strength and of resistance to calls of a lower kind. Her tower has naught to do with the personality. Forget not, my brother, that when you have learned to leave your tower it does not mean that you must range the levels of personality life with no true direction.

If you will look back upon the training which I have given you during the past few years, you will note that I have had a twofold task:

To reveal to you that you were a first ray type and needed, therefore, to learn attachment of the right kind. You had to learn to integrate into my group of disciples and to love with inclusion and not exclusion.
To set you free from a tower in which you have secluded yourself. This last task has been successfully accomplished. The first task yet remains to be carried out to a satisfactory conclusion.

The group of disciples to which you belong, my brother, is upon the mental plane and exists in two parts: There is the group of disciples to whom you belong, assigned to specific work by me; there is also the hierarchical group, my particular Ashram, to which you are affiliated and into which you must be absorbed by soul dedication and later, as the years slip away, by initiation. Only one thing prevents your rapid integration into your true place; that is your ancient love for astral wandering and for psychic phenomena.

This tendency to astralism is a heritage from other lives and has its basis in old monastic trends and in the dream world in which you wandered in olden times to relieve the monotony of life within the four walls of the cell in which you lived, dedicated to the contemplative life. Your consciousness was then mystical, visionary and imaginative, veering off into realms of astral hallucination. This means that in this life, your astral body easily reverts to ancient ways, to ancient thoughts, to control by ancient thought-forms and is consequently subject to facile deception. [635]

With first ray disciples, I can ever speak with clarity and frankness, knowing that they will take my words in the right spirit. I tell you, therefore, with truth and understanding, that you are wandering into the delusions of astral phenomena. There is no true reality in what you are now doing. You are a soul and not a seeker of astral phenomena.

Three or four of those with whom you work on the astral plane are genuinely deluded and they are in danger, for you are holding them back from progressing on to mental levels. For the majority of the group with whom you work, there is no reality at all; they are but shells of ancient astral workers, held together in form-activity by the few people who are on their way through the astral plane to higher levels. They are also held by those on the physical plane who are enticed by astral phenomena and temporarily sidetracked by the glamor.

The astral plane is not for you, my brother. I suggest that you relinquish this activity and begin again to function as a soul. The soul in its true nature does not identify itself with phenomena; it is the center of spiritual force through which the plans of God come into being. Your excursions into the world of maya and illusion have held back the group of disciples with which you are working and have postponed their united group activity. You have observed none of the rules governing my disciples, for months; this means, brother of old, that the group integrity has been infringed and that the group is not at this time functioning as a unit. Until it is again one functioning whole, our planned work cannot be undertaken. You are in the difficult position of holding your co-disciples back from a specific task to which they have been assigned.

Will you ponder upon these matters and during the coming months free yourself from this tendency to phenomenal enterprise? They have sidetracked you with frequency during the past ten years.

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