The first thing, therefore, which the aspirant must be taught is to know, past all interior controversy, where he stands upon that part of the Path of Evolution which stretches across the mental plane into the plane of buddhi, and thus is on the Way of the Higher Evolution. I am here using words symbolically. He must know which of the lights (to which he finds himself responsive) is the light which he must use to make further progress. Is the light of the personality to be trained upon the point of soul contact, so that the lower mind becomes the searchlight of revelation? Or has the point been reached where the light of the soul, which is the pure [414] energy of love, can be turned upon all life and circumstances in the three worlds, thus enabling the disciple to become a soul-infused personality and thus permitted entrance into the appropriate Ashram? Or has a still higher point been reached, and the light of the Spiritual Triad can begin to be directed upon the soul-infused personality, via the antahkarana?

It is at this point that the new training in this new era of hierarchical activity is applied to the modern disciple. Being naturally a mental type, he is unfolding rapidly a correct sense of proportion, and is therefore urged by ashramic activity and by the aura of the Ashram in which he is now permitted to work, to discover for himself that hint or veiled information which will clarify his way. He begins to understand that the lower mind, with its multiplicity of differentiations and its tabulating, analyzing and complicated approach to truth, is only a foundation upon which he can take a firm stand, but that he is faced with a profound simplicity; [415] he realizes that he must find out for himself that hint (which his own ray equipment hides but also reveals) which will enable him to substitute the pure reason for the many complexities of the lower mind. He has to wrestle with the problem of this simplicity, with its penetrating potency, and with its swift comprehension of the basic truth underlying the many truths; he learns, finally, to substitute the intuition - with its swiftness and its infallibility - for the slow and laborious work of the mind, with its deviousness, its illusions, its errors, its dogmatisms and its separative thinking and cultures. He finds out - as a preliminary step - the nature of his rays; he begins to discriminate between intelligence, love and what he believes, theoretically, the will may be, but he knows that he has as yet no real experience of this highest divine aspect. His developing intelligence is the result and the reward of experience; his understanding of love, the second divine aspect, is also in the experimental stage and his knowledge is not reliable; the fused expression of intelligence and love (of personality and soul, to be specific) can only be possible when the will aspect in some measure is beginning to function.